Sure, I'd be happy to.
We're big believers in data telling us what's happening, but stories can give people a sense of real possibilities for making progress on poverty, so I'm happy to share those.
When I was in Bangladesh, I worked for Grameen and my wife worked for BRAC, so we were considered a mixed marriage. I have a strong admiration for both organizations.
While writing a book called Small Loans, Big Dreams, I lived for the better part of two years in one village in Bangladesh. Not all the borrowers were equally successful, but one of them was a Hindu family that traditionally made sweets out of milk. Cottage cheese is the raw material for Indian sweets, as we see even in Indian restaurants here, but because they lacked capital, they had gotten out of that business and they were just labouring for hire in the fields for people who had land.
They got a loan that started with $70 and grew over time. They had had to sell their cows because of some crisis or natural disaster, but they started buying milk on the market, selling cottage cheese, making sweets, and selling the sweets in the market. Their big break was getting a contract with a shop in Dacca, which is about 90 kilometres away, to sell cottage cheese on a daily basis, usually one or two duffel bags of it. It was around 80 pounds, if I'm not mistaken, so they became a thriving business. They sold sweets locally and they sold the raw material for sweets to the capital city.
To show you the enterprising nature of the poor, I'll tell you about a 14-day transit strike in 1996. The opposition stopped all motorized transport, and except for 10 miles on bike, this family would send their cottage cheese on a public bus. I was trapped in the capital. When I came back after the strike broke, I asked what happened—whether they lost the contract, how they managed.
As if it was the strangest question, they said every day they'd have to finish work a little earlier and put those 80-pound bags of cottage cheese across their bikes. They would just bike all 90 kilometres into the capital, deliver the cheese, and then bike back the next morning to pick it up and do it all again.
This is a family in which the males had been reduced to wage-labouring for under $1 a day, but with a little capital to recover a skill that had almost been lost, they were a thriving business, creating business linkages for other dairy farmers in the area.
As you can see, the notion of the poor as superstitious, lazy folk sitting around waiting for people to do things for them doesn't stand up in this example.