We are what we spend, investing to achieve?

This week I thought I would write a slightly briefer post to discuss a TED talk that really opened my mind. The talk, given by the young social entrepreneur Andrew Youn, discusses the idea that we are what we spend, and how this very notion should be seen as nothing other than an opportunity for global scale social change.

Source: (Andrew Youn, 2018)

Andrew is the founder of a non-profit organisation called One Acre Fund which typically helps smallerholder farmers in East Africa. The organisation’s aim is to enable the farmers to lift themselves out of poverty with the correct investments, asset-based financing and agriculture training services to reduce hunger and poverty. One Acre Fund has been very successful with great results, growing 3 times the size since receiving an investment from The Audacious Project.

The talk begins with Andrew discussing his long-term fascination with the scale of global poverty. Citizens of the western world can throw food out of their heated homes and consume as much as could be desired. Whilst at the same time, a child in extreme poverty will likely never reach anything close to its full human potential and has a 1 in 10 chance of dying before reaching 5 years old.

“How do we live in a world of ever more technical achievement and wealth, and yet this child has almost no child of reaching her full human potential… The answer becomes clear when we look at how we direct our spending, the things we spend money on determine what we achieve”

One of the key points was how little priority we as the wealthy put towards social change. The vast proportion of our salary that is directed towards consumption has enabled vast commercial advancements, but the average person directs less than 1% towards charity or non-profit organisations.

I think Andrew’s idea of modern philanthropy is well thought out and shockingly hard to dispute. His argument enable commitment to global poverty, medicine and climate change improvements on a global scale. One Acre Fund is merely an example of a non-profit in this case.

I hope this short blog post will encourage you to think about this. What could happen if we put just one percent more of our income toward social change. We have gone to the moon and have made countries interconnect through technology, but we have left 1 billion of our population behind.