Who Owns Poverty?

Publisher: Red Press Ltd

This is the story of the one question about global poverty we never thought to ask: who owns it? It’s a question with an unexpected answer, one that challenges everything that we thought we knew about what poverty is, and what we can do about it. This is a story of a powerful data-driven methodology being used in a dozen countries across 5 continents. It’s a new approach that puts poor families in charge of defining and diagnosing their own unique, multidimensional poverty—who by owning the problem, own the solution. This book is for all the governments, development NGOs, charities, dreamers, thinkers, doers and leaders who are frustrated with limiting their aspirations to reducing poverty, or alleviating its effects—and the lack of progress we face in doing either. This is a book about unleashing trapped energy within poor families to do the unthinkable: eliminate global poverty once and for all.

Dr. Martin Burt is founder (1985) and CEO of Fundación Paraguaya, a non-profit organization devoted to the promotion of entrepreneurship and economic self-reliance to eliminate poverty around the world. He is a pioneer in applying microfinance, microfranchise, youth entrepreneurship, financial literacy and technical vocational methodologies to address chronic poverty around the world. He has developed one of the world’s first financially self-sufficient agricultural and tourism high schools for the rural poor. He is co-founder of Teach a Man to Fish, a global network based in London (3000 members-150 countries) that promotes “education that pays for itself” and which is partnering with more than 50 organizations from 27 countries to establish self-sufficient schools, mostly in rural areas.

He has also developed the Poverty Stoplight, a new poverty measurement tool and coaching methodology that assists families to self-diagnose their level of multidimensional poverty and develop customized plans to eliminate poverty. This new metric is now being implemented in more than 30 countries, including the US and the UK.

Dr. Burt is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship at the World Economic Forum. In public service he has served as Chief of Staff to the President of Paraguay, was elected Mayor of Asunción, and was appointed Vice Minister
of Commerce.