How technology can help us eliminate, not alleviate,

poverty
09 Sep 2015

Martin BurtCEO, Fundación Paraguay

As part of a blog series on Social Entrepreneurs, we spoke to Martin Burt, Founder

and Chief Executive Officer, Fundación Paraguaya, about his organization’s Poverty
Stoplight assessment tool to alleviate poverty in developing countries. Through an
online 30-minute survey, families can trace their own poverty map and develop and
implement a clear plan to overcome it. Poverty Stoplight is currently being used in 18
countries in Latin American, Africa and Asia, with the private sector showing interest
in using it to help their employees.

You have been a leading figure in Paraguay creating inclusive growth for
decades. You created Fundación Paraguaya, the first microfinance
organization in Paraguay, which has replicated its entrepreneurial education
programmes through a network of 2,500 institutions in 125 countries. You also
created the Poverty Stoplight, a visual survey to help poor people assess their
level of poverty on 50 indicators across six dimensions, such as whether they
have proper sanitation, whether their children have been vaccinated, etc. What
is different about Poverty Stoplight, and how does it help families get out of
poverty?

Technology allows many things today that were inconceivable or impractical in the
past. In this case, technology enables poor people to self-diagnose their own level of
poverty in 30 minutes using a smartphone or a tablet. For the first time, a family in a
poor slum or a rural village has the capacity to take stock of their own situation,
which is very empowering.

Traditionally, it has been a government social worker who administers a survey and
then takes that information with them. Poverty Stoplight is the opposite. Here, a
family assesses their level of poverty in 50 specific indicators, and the results are
visualized in a dashboard for the family to use. So instead of being an index for
policy-makers, the Poverty Stoplight is a tool for a very different kind of decision-
maker: the head of the household. Once that household’s deprivations are visualized
in the dashboard, the family creates a customized plan to prioritize their problems
and overcome them with the help of existing resources in the community.

A family may have an income gap, dental problems, latrine problems and
transportation problems, while the next door neighbour may have different
deprivations although they live in the same slum. The key is to allow each family to
take ownership of their situation, and make a family plan. What are my priorities?
What am I going to do to rectify this? Who has resources available in the community
who can help me? What is my timeframe? This plan is the family’s responsibility. Our
responsibility is to share those patterns with existing service providers in the
community – NGOs who make wheelchairs or agencies that do sanitation hook-ups,
for example, who can lend their support without having to take ownership of that
household’s overall situation.
Many corporations inside Paraguay are working with this tool. They have
publicly committed to eliminate extreme poverty among their employees. What
does that actually mean and what is their role in achieving such an audacious
goal?

We are persuading corporations, factories and companies to move beyond corporate

social responsibility to eliminate the poverty of their factory workers, or their coffee
growers, or whatever employees they may have. Forty-two corporations in Paraguay
have officially assumed responsibility and signed up, and we are working with other
international companies as well.

It works like this: we explain it to the head of a company’s human resources

department, who identifies the group of vulnerable workers and brings them in. Each
employee fills out their 30-minute self-diagnosis using a smartphone device. Once
we collect that information, we provide the company with an inventory of available
services in their region.

For example, the first thing the company will notice is that 99% of their workers do
not have savings accounts. So the leadership of the company engages with the bank
that serves the company to open 400 savings accounts for their workers. A worker
on his own cannot engage with the bank, but the owner of a company can. Let’s say
another three workers have a family member who needs a wheelchair – that’s just a
phone call away.

So the head of HR and social workers partner with the factory employees to see
what priorities need to be addressed and identify strategies to overcome poverty.
Maybe the employee says, “I’m going to get water first, I’ll fix my bathroom. I will
send my children to the dentist. I will discuss with my wife how we can make an extra
$100 a month selling food out of the house, because we live in a busy street near a
public transport stop.”

How is this tool facilitating decision-making inside government? How is it

catalysing policy change?

Governments tend to count outputs and activities – number of workshops, number of

vaccines, etc. – but not the outcomes those activities bring about. Healthcare is a
classic example. The government counts the number of clinics and the number of
doctors. But when you ask the population that is supposedly being served by that
clinic, they say we prefer to use traditional medicine because the doctors are never
there and they are not nice to us. This is just one example of the huge gap between
government perception and public perception.

For the first time, through the Poverty Stoplight data, governments have access to
the other side of service delivery. It is revolutionary for them to be able to see what
the outcomes really are. When government decision-makers see a Google map
overlay of our Poverty Stoplight respondents, with different filters for which families
are reporting undernourishment, which families are not vaccinated, which families do
not have birth certificates for their children, they love it. They love it because
governments are usually trained to use samples and census data. Let’s say the
census data indicates 85% of children have birth certificates. The problem is that the
civil registry issuing birth certificates does not know which children fall into the 15%
without them. Now governments can have a granular view of the data, which allows
them to send in their social workers to increase the coverage to 100% of, say,
vaccinations or birth certificates.

More governments must become aware of the advantages of digital technologies.

You are not only a social entrepreneur, but you have also been a government
minister, trying to create social change from within government structures.
What is your advice for social entrepreneurs on how to work more effectively
with government?

The first thing to understand is that governments have something that social
entrepreneurs may not have, which is the problem of accountability. Governments
respond to other people, and many times social entrepreneurs are only accountable
to themselves and to their own organizations.

You also need to be empathic of government’s limitations. There are people in every
single Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health or Central Bank who are worried
about improving education, healthcare services or financial inclusion. Sometimes
they just don’t know how. The role of the social entrepreneur is to meet government
officials where they are, present their innovation in a way that is absorbable to
government and help government decision-makers figure out how to get a bigger
bang for their buck.

Some social entrepreneurs don’t like engaging in politics and complain that working
with government is too slow. But sooner or later, irrespective of whether you want
public money, you will need to engage government. It doesn’t matter if you’re in eye
care or water or energy or financial inclusion – governments have scale,
governments set policy and regulatory frameworks, governments have nation-wide
infrastructure. Engaging with governments is a critical challenge if social
entrepreneurs want to take their innovations to scale.

Let’s explore your pathway to scale. How do you think about scale in that large
sense of the broader system-level change you are trying to bring about?

The Poverty Stoplight is already in 18 countries. The country that is most advanced
is South Africa, where a local organization set up the Poverty Stoplight to work in the
townships of Cape Town, but it’s been adapted to eight African countries and eight
Latin American countries and in India and Vietnam. Encouragingly, we are getting
calls from the private sector and the microfinance sector.

We realized we don’t actually need to be physically present in every country for this
tool to be adopted. We want to establish a mechanism where people can come and
take on this thing without us. We have to create a Poverty Stoplight in a toolkit so
that people can access it. My dream is that, by virtue of the technology and
information revolution we have, it can be as easy to use as Facebook. We have to
create the right incentives for people to quickly self-diagnose and connect them to
the resources available within their communities. At the end of the day, it has to be a
crowdsourcing tool.
Instead of being limited in what you can do, now you just have to leverage other
people’s resources to provide goods and services that are outside of your scope. For
example, now you can provide wheelchairs to a family member of one of your
employees without actually running a wheelchair program. And for the NGO
distributing wheelchairs, they can work with microfinance organizations to help move
their wheelchair recipients out of poverty. All of this is now possible because we
have access to all of this information we did not have before.

Have you read?

How can we scale up healthy eating in schools?
How can we get books to the children who need them most?
Curing blindness around the world

Martin Burt was interviewed by Katherine Milligan, Director and Head of the Schwab

Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship

Image: A boy uses a tablet outside his house at the Mare slums complex in Rio de
Janeiro March 25, 2014. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes