An article about how hope and optimism (“a feeling that a better outcome is possible”) for the future are important for development in impoverished areas. I would be interested to see the spending behavior of women though, whether they also “self-medicate” with self-destruction behaviors or invest more money on their family. Especially since many of these countries are patriarchal. 

Excerpts taken from the New York Times:

Alfred Nasoni and his wife, Biti Rose, have had seven children in this village of Masumba. Two died without ever seeing a doctor. Alfred and Biti Rose pulled their eldest son out of school in the fourth grade because, they said, they couldn’t afford $5 in school costs for a term. And they farmed only part of their 2.5 acre plot because they lacked money for seeds.

Yet poverty is sometimes romanticized, and it’s more complicated than that. Alfred, 45, told me that even as his children were starving, he spent an average of $2 a week on local moonshine and 50 cents on cigarettes. He added that he also spent $2 or more a week buying sex from local girls — even though AIDS is widespread.

All this hints at an uncomfortable truth: The suffering associated with poverty is sometimes caused not only by low incomes but also by self-destructive pathologies. In central Kenya, a recently published government study found that men, on average, spent more of their salaries on alcohol than on food.

It’s a vicious circle: despair leads people to self-medicate in ways that compound the despair.

Yet there are escape hatches. In 2005, Biti Rose joined a village savings group founded by CARE, the international aid group. These “village savings and loans” are among the hottest ideas in development work. They now serve some six million people in 58 countries.

[…]

With a loan of $2, Biti Rose started making and selling a local version of doughnuts, which she initially sold for 2 cents each. “People really liked my doughnuts,” she noted, and soon she was making several dollars a day in profit. Inspired by her example, Alfred began growing vegetables and selling them; he turned out to be a shrewd businessman as well.

Seeing an upward trajectory in the family fortunes, Alfred cut out the girlfriends and curbed his drinking, he says.

To read more, click here.

A radical new explanation from psychologists.

Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. 

In addition, researchers have expanded the theory to cover tradeoff decisions, not just self-control decisions. That is, any decision that requires tradeoffs seems to deplete our ability to muster willpower for future decisions.  

As Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir formulated the point in a recent talk, for the poor, “almost everything they do requires tradeoff thinking. It’s distracting, it’s depleting … and it leads to error.” 

In a paper in April 2010, Harvard behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan and MIT’s Abhijit Banerjeeapplied this same notion to decisions requiring self-control. If a doughnut costs twenty-five cents, they wrote, then that “$0.25 will be far more costly to someone living on $2 a day than to someone living on $30 a day. In other words, the same self-control problem is more consequential for the poor.” And so, in addition to all the structural barriers that prevent even determined poor people from escaping poverty, there may be another, deeper, and considerably more disturbing barrier: Poverty may reduce free will, making it even harder for the poor to escape their circumstances.

The economist Amartya Sen, in his well-known volume Development as Freedom, notes how an individual’s “freedom of agency” is “constrained by the social, political and economic opportunities” available to them. He’s right: Fewer options do reduce freedom. But now, we may need to grapple with a new possibility: that poverty doesn’t simply reduce freedom by constraining an individual’s choices, but that it may actually alter the nature of freedom by reducing an individual’s willpower.

Source: The New Republic

Although this blog is not talking about a specific woman, I think it is important to mention The Harpswell Foundation and their mission to help women in Cambodia.

According to The Harpswell Foundation website, this NGO was created to help provide housing, promote, educate, and inspire marginalized women in developing countries. In 2007, The Harpswell Foundation was recognized by the Cambodian government. They have built many schools in countrysides where it is much needed. A year later, they received a gold medal for their humanitarian service by the Cambodian government, presented by Deputy prime minister Kong Som Ol.

To read more about The Harpswell Foundation please, click here.

(via inspire-satreykhmer) <— Please visit and follow my friend’s tumblr, especially if you are interested in Cambodia, women’s rights and the developing world. :)