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The chapter will be published in due course

The chapter will be published in due course

The chapter will be published in due course

The article will published in due course

01| You have two girls of around ten years. Their school performance is average but they cause no problems. They are like I was — with interests outside school. Learning a new dance is a lot more fun than learning that the King of wherever conquered more land wherever. In my case, during the week I was visualizing how I would score three goals on Sunday. One of these girls' parents have money, living a comfortable upper-middle class lifestyle in a well-to-do neighborhood. The

THE LINES, AND WHAT THEY MISS 01| The first thing that strikes you when you dive into the strategies that governments use to fight poverty is the almost obsessive effort to define the poor. In certain countries, you are extremely poor when you earn less than U$3.00 a day. Yet if you earn U$3.25, you are just poor. Yet what is the difference in living between earning U$2.90 or U$3.25—a 10% differential? Are you really better off? Maybe you need to travel more—take two buses in

01| Everything else in this book is a means. This is the end: real Peoples' Impact. Change that people feel on their own street, not change that appears in a report. Every mechanism we have built — the markets, the training, the platform, the organization — is downstream of whether that actually happens. 02| It is not an ambition. It is the survival condition, and the failure runs as a loop. If the change is not tangible, support for the Peoples' Impact movement drains away.

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01| Everything at IkoCiti becomes public within 48 hours. That rule was not written for good news. Its only real test is what we do with the list of things that could destroy the platform — and this book part is that list. We publish it for a plain reason first: any serious funder will assemble it anyway, out of our own documents, in a room we are not sitting in. We would rather write it ourselves and be judged on the quality of our thinking about it than be handed it by some

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01| IkoCiti works with people, not with target groups. A barrio is rebuilt by residents who take on a role, and the roles are few, plain and open to anybody who wants one. The barrio side of the platform holds three of them: the resident who runs the work, the friends who turn up to help, and the team the work is done in. Everything else in the catalogue of players — the money, the professionals, the staff, the wider public — exists to make those three roles possible. If the

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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

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V7-4.01| NOBODY REPEATS A MESSAGE THEY CANNOT REMEMBER 01| Most organisations survive mediocre communication. They have cushions. A hospital has a building people already drive to. A bank has regulatory permission nobody else has. An old NGO has forty years of name recognition that keeps the cheques arriving even when its annual report is unreadable. Confusion costs these organisations efficiency. It does not cost them existence. 02| We have no cushions. No buildings, no trac

01| In most social programmes, data is a receipt. It gets produced after the work is done, formatted for the funder, filed, and never read again by anyone who could act on it. The report is the last step of the project. We do the opposite: data is the first step of the next project. 02| Every intervention a Maveriq completes gets indexed. What was done, under what conditions, with what resources, in what kind of street, and whether it held six months later. Not because a fund

01| Start with what oppression is for. Not cruelty for its own sake — cruelty is expensive and draws attention. The working purpose is to keep a group out of the parts of the economy where the money and the decisions are. Deny the equal education, so the skills never form. Erode the confidence, call them inferior often enough that they say it themselves, so the ambition never forms. What you get at the other end is a labour market with fewer serious competitors at the middle

01| There is no shortage of answers to poverty. Cash, credit, training, clinics, block grants, vouchers, subsidised firms, community meetings — each arrived with a theory, a constituency and a decade of expansion. What is short is the ability to say which of them does anything, and the honest reason is not that nobody has looked. It is that the field has never agreed on what a solution is being asked to do. 02| The usual way of asking is a league table. Models are listed down

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01| I do not know how to build this thing. Let me get that out of the way on the first page of the volume that is supposed to explain how it gets built. 02| I do not know blockchain. I have no informed opinion on databases, on EdTech stacks, or on whether this should run on one cloud or three. I have read enough to sound dangerous at a dinner party, which is precisely the level of knowledge that kills projects. A founder who half-understands the technology makes confident dec

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