The Pope and the CEO > Development
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PovertyCure – What if we’ve been asking the wrong questions?
“Charity has its place in emergency situations.… A life that is lived on as a recipient of charity is a miserable life. I think, in our DNA, the way God made us, we are made as co-creators. God wants us to perfect and to really finish His creation. And if you’re simply a recipient of charity, you’re not doing that; you’re not fulfilling your real destiny, which is this creative capacity that God has endowed us with, we’re letting that creative capacity sit idle. I think that’s—at probably at the deepest level that I can reach—what’s so inadequate about the traditional response to poverty.” Damian von Stauffenberg
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The Catholic Church Wants More African Businesses
It only seems right that the person in need of development (and we all are) should be at the forefront of that development – not just economic, but spiritual, physical, intellectual, emotional, etc. A symposium held in Rome recently, organized by the Harambe Entrepreneur Alliance and the Acton Institute, proposed just that: more businesses in Africa, created by African businesspeople. This is no doubt something that we are in favor of here at Faith and Prosperity. Hopefully men and women in Africa will answer the call from the symposium.
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Entrepreneurship – The Best Employment
The United States Embassy in Benin recently organized a three-day conference to train entrepreneurs in the developing West African nation. The conference sought to train people in the skills needed to start their own business and give them the information necessary on the laws and regulations for small businesses in their country. I lived in Benin for a couple of years, so this kind of news I find particularly encouraging. I think giving people the opportunity that they need and showing them that they have the resources necessary to succeed is extremely important. Sometimes there is a latent drive in the person that just needs to be unleashed. Benin has enjoyed relative peace and stability, particularly for the past twenty years. There are many smart, enterprising people that I met while I was over there, and I have high hopes for the country. Let’s hope that this conference really has an impact and leads to further economic development in Benin.
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Do We Trust Our Entrepreneurs?
Xavier Fontanet is the president and CEO of Essilor, the French company that specializes in corrective lenses. I had the pleasure of meeting him recently at the 2011 Zermatt Summit, a conference dedicated to exploring the issues of justice, fairness, and globalization. He recently published a book called Si on faisait confiance aux entrepreneurs, about the trust that we should place in entrepreneurship, globalization, free enterprise, and competition. This review provides a synopsis, in English, of his book, and of his thought – that healthy competition improves all those who come in contact with it, and that globalization has great potential for the good. He has very clear ideas, and his encouragement for enterprise to play a role in continued economic development is very admirable. If you’re a French speaker, I encourage you to check out his blog, which he updates every couple of weeks, even answering questions from readers! What do you think about the book’s synopsis? Let us know in the comments.
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Leveling the Plowing Fields
Andreas put up a blog about the book Enough: Why The World’s Poorest Starve In An Age of Plenty a few months ago. The book, by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, addresses the issues underlying the food shortages that we often hear about in the news. Most recently, the United Nations declared regions in Somalia to be in a state of famine. There are countless reasons listed by Thurow and Kilman in their book, from slow adoption and funding for hybrid seeds, to agricultural subsidies given by governments of developed countries, and from underdeveloped infrastructure for bringing crops to market to a lack of crop insurance in developing countries. Unstable political situations have also contributed to the problems. Thurow and Kilman give several recommendations at the end of their book. One is, I think, aptly titled “Leveling the plowing fields.” While the authors use this to call for an end to farm subsidies in developed countries, I think it’s a useful metaphor for the whole of what the book is calling for – including the developing countries in networks of productivity, something Blessed John Paul II always called for. This means not just removing subsidies, but improving markets, and letting… Read more
