Poverty Cure: Jerry Sternin's Switchheath, Chip

The practical insights that I gathered after watching, Poverty Cure ( ) are: giving free resources to fix poverty is not effective, it is a Band-Aid and poverty is not solved by an outside entity telling people what to do, the solution comes from within the affected culture. In the book SwitchHeath,Chip, the authors tell a story about the journey Jerry Sternin, took as he tried to fight malnutrition in Vietnam with the organization, Save the Children. (Heath,Chip, Heath, Dan, 2010). Sternin received no money to fix the malnutrition problem. He decided to start meeting with mothers in the communities and then had them go out and collect data on weight and height of the children. From that data, he and a team of local mothers

They discovered that the nourished kids were fed the same amount of food, but four times a day, whereas the malnourished kids were only eating twice a day. They also discovered that the mothers were hand feeding the nourished kids versus communal style eating that the malnourished children were experiencing. That was not all, the better-nourished kids " mothers were collecting tiny shrimp and crabs from the rice paddies and mixing them in with their kid’s rice” and “tossed in sweet-potato greens, which were considered a low-class food” (Heath, Heath, 2010, p. 30). Jerry Sternin didn't share the results with the entire community but instead encouraged the local community to come up with a program that taught the people how to make the healthy food and how to space out meals. The health of the community began to change, and children soon became nourished. The important lessons of this story are that

I would guess that the people who came up with the idea had great intentions sending these people a protein source that would not cost a lot and didn’t have too many food safety issues. As an outsider, it would be hard to see that an innocent egg donation could completely dissolve the jobs of many and eliminate an entire industry. The same holds true for the second-hand clothing donations; it is almost unimaginable that giving clothes to a country would shut down their current clothing industry. Like with the free eggs, free medical supplies appear to be a wonderful gift for people in need. As an outsider, we see an unmet demand for medical help and are eager to jump in and fix the deficit. The problem with outsiders intervening to solve a perceived the problem is that we end up hurting the people who already have a business in that community. Although the current business may not be able to keep up with all the demand, the free medical supplies that the outsider provides disrupts the good that the current vendor is doing for the country’s economy and its