Poverty - Publications - Faculty & Research

12 Aug 2002
Op-Ed

Using Big Business to Fight Poverty

will require a new institution that can harness the capabilities of global corporations and, helped by loans from development agencies, directly attack the root causes of poverty. The need for corporate involvement in the fight against View Details

Keywords: by George C. Lodge

2014
Working Paper

Poverty and Crime: Evidence from Rainfall and Trade Shocks in India

By: Lakshmi Iyer and Petia Topalova

Does poverty lead to crime? We shed light on this question using two independent and exogenous shocks to household income in rural India: the dramatic reduction in import tariffs in the early 1990s and rainfall variations. We find that trade shocks, previously shown to... View Details

Keywords: Rainfall; Weather; Crime; Trade Liberalization; India; Crime and Corruption; Poverty; India

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February 1998
Background Note

The Size of the Global Poverty Sector

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Patricia Walker

Keywords: Wealth and Poverty

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30 Mar 2018
News

Fighting Poverty One Neighborhood at a Time

cookie-cutter approach. Many of our partners have been battling poverty and crime in their cities for decades. Our job is to listen and offer advice that will help them get the results they want.” (Published March 2018) View Details

20 Jun 2016
News

Having an Impact on Development and Poverty Issues

limited ability to scale up and have broad-based impact. Vikram Gandhi (MBA 1989) is working to change that by creating investments that can be self-sustaining. “India has 400 million people within the poverty line,” says Gandhi. “While... View Details

Keywords: Constantine von Hoffman

25 Aug 2016
News

Having an Impact on Development and Poverty Issues

Vikram Gandhi (MBA 1989) started Asha Impact to bring together successful business leaders and entrepreneurs to help India’s poor with affordable housing, financial inclusion, and access to energy. “India has 400 million people within the View Details

12 Oct 2017
News

Fighting Poverty One Neighborhood at a Time

all residents,” he notes. Majors emphasizes that he and his colleagues are careful to “listen first and talk later.” “Each neighborhood’s context and assets are unique. There is no cookie-cutter solution. Many clients have been battling View Details

Keywords: Deborah Blagg

29 Jan 2016
News

What Data Can Do to Fight Poverty

December 2018 (Revised July 2023)
Case

Instituto Dara: Breaking the Cycle of Poverty and Illness at Scale

By: Julie Battilana, Marissa Kimsey, Priscilla Zogbi and Johanna Mair

Dr. Vera Cordeiro founded the NGO Instituto Dara in 1991 to help poor families break the cycle of poverty and illness in Brazil. She and her team of employees and volunteers developed a holistic methodology to address the multidimensional sources of poverty based on... View Details

Keywords: Social Innovation; NGO; Scaling; Health; Social Enterprise; Social Entrepreneurship; Non-Governmental Organizations; Health Care and Treatment; Poverty; Health Industry; South America; Brazil

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04 Sep 2019
News

Research Brief: Ending the Legacy of Poverty

Scott Duke Kominers (photo by Evgenia Eliseeva) Scott Duke Kominers (photo by Evgenia Eliseeva) Income inequality over multiple generations is not just the result of wealthy families passing down money—it’s how those families spend their money, namely on their... View Details

Keywords: Jennifer Myers; Educational Services

17 Oct 2014
News

A passion for alleviating poverty and inequality

Patricio (“Pato”) Bichara (MBA 2015) is passionate about the need to alleviate poverty and inequality in his native Mexico and the role he expects to play in this challenge. (Published October 2014) View Details

25 Jan 2018
News

Investing in India’s Nonprofits to Overcome Poverty Sustainably

Khushboo Maheshwari (MBA 2012) is new initiatives leader of The/Nudge Foundation and director and head of N/Core, which support nonprofits working on problems related to poverty in India. In this interview, she describes N/Core’s mission... View Details

24 Apr 2014
News

Breaking the cycle of poverty in urban areas

As president of Eos Foundation, Andrea Silbert (AB 1986, MBA 1991, MPA 1992) invests charitable dollars to help fight poverty and hunger in Massachusetts. In 2007 Silbert became president of the Boston-based philanthropic grant-making... View Details

07 May 2009
News

Harvard think tank addresses societal concerns, poverty

24 Apr 2014
News

Creating a path out of poverty through entrepreneurship

Annie Bertrand (MBA 2007) tallks about helping create the India School Fund to integrate entrepreneurship skills with other educational goals to give poor rural Indian children a path out of poverty. (Published April 2014) View Details

November 2002 (Revised March 2006)
Case

ApproTEC Kenya: Technologies to Fight Poverty and Create Wealth

By: V. Kasturi Rangan

ApproTEC markets a range of technologies to improve the income of subsistence farmers and other small-scale entrepreneurs in East Africa. Having achieved considerable success in its first eight years, the two founders/entrepreneurs are seeking ways to scale the impact... View Details

Keywords: Social Enterprise; Development Economics; Poverty; Information Technology; Entrepreneurship; Nonprofit Organizations; Growth and Development Strategy; Kenya; Africa

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2022
Article

Alleviating Time Poverty Among the Working Poor: A Pre-Registered Longitudinal Field Experiment

By: A.V. Whillans and Colin West

Poverty entails more than a scarcity of material resources—it also involves a shortage of time. To examine the causal benefits of reducing time poverty, we conducted a longitudinal feld experiment over six consecutive weeks in an urban slum in Kenya with a sample of... View Details

Keywords: Time; Subjective Well Being; Administrative Costs; Friction; Poverty; Well-being; Money; Perception; Kenya

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