Teaching a man to fish

Super cool commentary about lending to the poor and tackling root problems versus putting band-aids on them. An excerpt:

"Gifts of charity do provide income to the poor, but they do not necessarily increase their freedom. Only the poor receive gifts of charity, and only the poor truly understand the weight of the debt created by such gifts. All gift-giving creates some form of indebtedness. For the recipients of charity, that debt can never be repaid. As a result, charitable giving can increase the unfreedom of the poor by confirming — to themselves and others — their status as distant, needy, and different from the non-poor. It is perhaps not surprising that while charity may work well to temporarily ameliorate the suffering of the poor, it has been criticized for failing to transform the conditions that create and perpetuate poverty. In fact, charity frequently has been associated with not only not changing the conditions of poverty, but even deepening them.

The lives of the poor are precarious, dangerous, and disadvantaged. However, the poor are not without resources and they are not irretrievably lost. "Microlending" is an approach that begins with assumption that poverty, not the poor themselves, is the problem. Further, it assumes that under the right conditions and with the right methods, the poor can become non-poor."