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I kept thinking, ‘This cannot be my life. I know I have the potential to do so much more.’

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(Candace Keshwar, member of the Family Independence Initiative)

With a new poverty fighting approach she was able to get her life back on it’s feet and look forward to the future again. 

They started with 25 families in three cohorts — eight African American families, six Salvadoran refugee families and 11 Iu Mien families from Laos. The latter were all on welfare. F.I.I. asked them to write down their goals, gave each a computer and enlisted them to fill in a questionnaire each month that tracked changes in things like income, assets, debts, health, education, skills, social networks and civic engagement.

They offered families $30 for every success they reported up to a maximum of $200 per month. (F.I.I. pays for reporting, not for specific actions, a different anti-poverty approach known as “conditional cash transfers” that we have reported on in Fixes.) Lim Miller reasoned that if he were to hire a consultant to collect this data, it would cost three or four times more. The families agreed to meet with an F.I.I. liaison every three months for an audit. Anything they reported — a pay increase, a doctor visit, an improvement in a child’s grades — had to be documented.

Please go to the website of the NYTimes and read the two articles!

Part 1

Part 2

What if you apply these principles to other parts of the world, for instance: rural communities in Africa. You could use mobile phones to do the surveys and make the pay outs, it’s very scalable and could have a huge impact. It’s certainly worth a try!