David Henderson, a social enterpreneur, posted this great blog “No Not All Poor People are Entrepreneurs” on socialentrepreneurship.change.org today. In it he points to something I’ve always believed was a problem in poverty alleviation efforts: the Western propensity to “romanticize the poor as entrepreneurs.”
“The unifying trait of the poor is not entrepreneurial spirit. It is the absence of wealth and opportunity. Some people are entrepreneurial — poor or otherwise — but most people are not. Our obsession with the poor as entrepreneurs has less to do with a poverty alleviation model that works than it does with a Western idealization of entrepreneurialism. We celebrate the entrepreneur as a vicarious escape from the cubicle confines of a steady paycheck. But what the poor desire isn’t the risk and excitement of entrepreneurship –it’s the economic security of stable employment.”
Amen! Poverty alleviation should equal having a job, not creating one. That is after all the situation in the West. Most of us in the United States work for someone. This is what people in the developing world would like as well. Sure there are individuals in Africa, Latin America and Asia who want to be the next Richard Branson or Michael Dell. But the majority just want a stable job with benefits (like me). They don’t want to be bothered with the complications and stress of being an entrepreneur (like me). Being an entrepreneur is hard. It’s complicated. It requires tremendous dedication. It requires sacrifice, which the poor know all too much about.
If someone in the developing world wants to take an idea to scale, let’s help them. Otherwise, let’s, as David points out, ”engage people as they are — rather than what we wish they were.”
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A very timely post, Elmira – thank you. I’m planning to open a handcrafts workshop in Istanbul this summer, and want to provide jobs for women who might otherwise have a tough time in that big city. I’m in the early planning stages, so this goal may morph a few more times.
But I have written in my ‘action plan’ (how very Western of me!) that I “must learn what these women need, not what I want to provide for them”. As much as I like the risk of forging my own career path, there is a lot to be said for the stability of steady income. I’ve seen enough to know that most entrepreneurs from disadvantaged areas have little choice other than to struggle to create their own opportunities, or remain in poverty. Nothing very romantic about that.
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