Book club meeting
- African Information Centre
- 15/09/11 19:00
Dear friends, readers and supporters of the African Information Centre.
The next meeting of the book club where we discuss interesting titles and hot issues, is about to take place. The theme for our next discussion is "Radically new thinking of the way to fight global poverty?"
The book discussed: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2011), Authors: Abhijit Banerjee a Esther Duflo
The discussion is usually in English and the club meeting is open to anybody who is interested in the topic.
French economist Esther Duflo thinks poverty can be alleviated or even eradicated with the right policies. All it takes is for politicians to "translate research into action", implementing programmes that have been shown to work. Duflo and the co-author of the book Abhijit Banerjee have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this and their 15 years of research from Chile to India, Kenya to Indonesia, they have identified wholly new aspects of the behavior of poor people, their needs, and the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work defies certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning, that poverty at the level of 99 cents a day is just a more extreme version of the experience any of us have when our income falls uncomfortably low.
