Things are better than you think
During the seven years I worked with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), I had many interesting and uplifting experiences. One of the most quirky and unexpected was a meeting with Ola Rosling, co-author of “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think”.
A colleague and I met with the bright and enthusiastic scholar who had a clear mission to share something important with us. He began by taking us through some multiple choice questions on the state of the world (note: multiple choice made it easier to select the answer). You can take the quiz yourself here.
Being a seasoned international development professional, and being that there were two of us responding, I was confident we had this in the bag. The questions covered things like: percentage of the world’s population living in poverty, numbers of years girls spend in primary education. To my surprise we got only 50% right (the average score is 40%).
The premise of what Rosling is communicating is that:
The world, for all its imperfections, is in a better state than we might think.
Our instincts distort our perspective, so even our guesses about what we don’t know are informed by predictable and unconscious biases.
Worrying about things we don’t actually know about detracts us from focusing on things that most threaten us.
Let’s turn to the focus of Karuna’s work in South Asia and see how this applies. Poverty rates in India, Bangladesh and Nepal have all declined significantly in the last twenty years between 10-25% of the overall population. That’s hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty! How does that happen? By people helping people, and making sure that people have opportunities. This gives us cause for hope. Change is possible, change does happen. And Karuna-USA knows how to help.
And, still around three hundred million people still live in poverty in these countries. So there remains a lot of work to do. And that’s why we’re here! Better informed by the reality we are working in we can follow the mantra: Change is possible, change does happen.
Ananta
CEO, Karuna USA