I am going to ask you something that I didn't ask anybody else.
The preface is that probably the most remarkable person I have met in my life is a woman named Ingrid Munro, from Denmark. She was in charge of the African Housing Fund and had retired, but a group of about 50 street beggars from Nairobi came to her and asked her to provide help. These were women who had nothing. She started a microfinance organization called Jamii Bora.
The other side of that was a woman named Beatrice, who was 50 years old and blind. She had seven children and twelve grandchildren. In the space of two years, all seven children died of AIDS and tuberculosis, and she was left with the grandchildren. She thought she would put arsenic in their porridge. She told us this in Nairobi. Alexa McDonough was with me.
Instead she borrowed the equivalent of $20 U.S. from this microfinance organization. She now has four businesses. These are not Coca-Cola or GM. She sells fruits and vegetables. She's a landlord and does things like that.
Could a model like that work?
The other thing that Ingrid said, and Ingrid is not a soft old lefty, is that people ask how we take people out of poverty. She said, “I can't take anybody out of poverty. They take themselves out, but we have to create the conditions.”
Microfinance works, and microcredit. Is there a model that could work here to assist people in poverty?