Events

In this seminar, "The 'Poverty Stoplight' Approach to Eliminating Multidimensional Poverty," Dr. Burt will discusses his work as founder and director of Fundación Paraguaya, a social mission organization devoted to poverty elimination in the world through entrepreneurship and self-reliance. Martin Burt has been developing a new participatory, bottom-up poverty measurement tool and coaching methodology to help rural and urban poor in different countries to overcome the different deprivations that affect them. The metric allows poor families to self-diagnose their level of multidimensional poverty as a first step in developing customized and personalized strategies to lift themselves permanently out of poverty. In order to capture the multiple dimensions of poverty, the tool uses stoplight colors (i.e., red, yellow, green), illustrations, maps, electronic tablets, and simple software to create innovative maps that enable the poor to see and understand the ways in which they are poor. The methodology and tool also allow businesses, NGOs, and governments to support families’ efforts to pull themselves out of poverty in efficient, targeted ways.