01| The anti-poverty industry has two halves that share a name and share almost nothing else. One responds to events — war, earthquake, drought, epidemic, an outflow of people across a border. The other works on chronic poverty over decades. Only the first is called an emergency, and that word is where the trouble starts, because an emergency implies a clock. 02| The clock is stated openly. The crisis half's declared horizon is weeks to a few years. Its financing runs on annu

01| Filter out the crisis half. Apply an urban filter to what remains. The list of organisations whose reason for existing is urban poverty is two names long. 02| UN-Habitat is the only UN agency with a specifically urban mandate. It is headquartered in Nairobi and operates in around ninety countries through a thin country presence. Its commonly cited budget is around 175 million dollars a year, almost all earmarked project funding. The money it controls at its own discretion

01| The convenient version of the story is that a settlement like Mathare has no plan — that nobody has thought about it as a whole, and the fragmentation on the ground reflects an absence of vision. That version is wrong, and the correction is more damaging than the claim. 02| The Mathare Zonal Plan was produced by Muungano Support Trust, Slum Dwellers International, the University of Nairobi and the University of California, Berkeley. Work began in 2008, a report on selecte

01| Money enters this system at the top from a small group of donor governments and leaves it at the bottom in a settlement. Between those two points it passes through organisations, and each passage costs something. That is not scandal; it is how any delivery chain works. What matters is the shape of the chain and who it is arranged to protect. 02| The UN's deduction is standardised and public. The inter-agency working group endorsed "the use of 7% as a harmonized indirect P

01| Every project has a budget. Every budget breaks into line items. Divide a line item by the number of things it delivered and you have a unit cost: what one latrine cost, one water connection, one land title, one metre of paved footpath. These numbers exist inside the files of every agency that has ever built anything. 02| So it should be possible to collect them. Gather enough project documents, extract the unit costs, and you would have something this sector has never ha

01| If funding followed effectiveness, weak organisations would shrink and strong ones would grow. That is what a market does. Instead, organisations of very different quality persist side by side for decades, and nobody in the system appears to be doing anything wrong. 02| There are three places the mechanism could break. Donors might not act on performance. Organisations might not signal it. Or the information might not exist. All three have been tested, and the results are

01| In 2019 official finance from richer countries to poorer ones moved through more than 222,000 separate transactions. The average one was worth 1.4 million dollars. That was a twenty-four percent jump in a single year to an all-time high, and it sits inside a longer trend: the average size of an aid activity has fallen roughly thirty-five percent since 2000. 02| More money, cut into more and smaller pieces. On the receiving end it arrives as administrative load. Ethiopia h

01| The familiar complaint about talent in this sector is dispersion: capable people scattered across a million small organisations and causes, each doing a little, none reaching the scale where anything changes. 02| That version is intuitive, widely repeated, and unmeasured. No study we can find demonstrates that talent dispersion across many small organisations reduces aggregate impact. It may be true. It is not evidence, and it should be stated as a hypothesis or not state

01| Consider a neighbourhood programme that does everything right. It trains people and they get better jobs. It builds capability and the capable use it. Earnings rise for everyone it touches. Five years later the neighbourhood's statistics are unchanged. 02| This is not a paradox and it is not evidence of fraud. It is arithmetic. People who become better off tend to move, and other people move in behind them. The Urban Institute states the mechanism plainly: if the more suc