Microfinance, a system of services including small loans, is premised on the idea that charity merely perpetuates the cycle of poverty, creating an ethos of dependency. Opportunities like microloans, alternatively, are meant to provide capital for entrepreneurial ventures, giving the poor a chance to work their way toward self-sufficiency. But many borrowers are now just racking up debt to survive day-to-day, forgetting about tomorrow. Moreover, more and more for-profit MFIs are popping up and without proper regulation, who’s to say that lenders won’t just become loan sharks? In fact, Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Prize for his microcredit work with Grameen Bank, has resoundingly criticized for-profit micro-lenders throughout South Asia for abusing the model. 

The microfinance model can be contrasted to Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT). CCT is a process through which individuals are given small, but regular and predictable cash sums for fulfilling agreed-upon conditions that contribute to their long-term odds of escaping poverty—say, $7 per month for giving up child labor and attending school. Mexico’s Oportunidades, one of the oldest CCT programs and most rigorously evaluated, has been associated with a 30 percent reduction in the poverty gap and, according to the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, raised the height-for-age of beneficiary children by 1 cm. But seriously, CCT smacks of paternalism. There’s a standard question to be raised “Who are we to tell poor people how to live their lives?” CTT assumes the poor don’t access health care, education or adequate nutrition because they prefer not to, not that they merely have a legion of other factors preventing them from doing so.

Oh, methods & pragmatics.

“Traditional approaches to providing development assistance for health have not been able to address both prevalent and emergent public health challenges captured in the Goals; these challenges demand sustained forms of financial redistribution through a coordinated mechanism. A global social health protection fund is proposed to address recurring failures in the modern aid distribution mechanism.”

Interesting read:  Financing the Millennium Development Goals for health and beyond: sustaining the ‘Big Push’

A global public sector? Interesting idea, but maybe it is an idea whose time is due. Many of us already live in a globalized world. We buy goods and services from the same multinationals, we consume global culture, travel is becoming easier and cheaper. Can a potential global public sector learn any lessons from the global private sector? How do multinationals operate so successfully in so many different jurisdictions and yet successfully meet local demands? Why are consumers so content to be in the hands of small groups of commercial decision makers? What a global public sector needs is to find a simple, effective way of ensuring an acceptable level of accountability.

& in the morning I’ll be with you

but it’ll be a different kind.

The bittersweet between my teeth. Trying to find the in-between.

& I said I know it well

That secret that you know that you don’t know how to tell.