Alleviating poverty through education and entrepreneurship

I’m a believer in two key methods to alleviate poverty and stimulate long-term economic growth for developing countries:

•  Education – Out of all children in Kenya about 85% of children attend primary school (but <50% finish), 24% of children attend secondary school, and 2% attend higher institutions. At this level of attrition more than half the population has not even completed primary school, which is typical of developing African countries. Access to knowledge and information is a critical part of opportunity creation for people in Africa.
• Entrepreneurship – This is Africa's (and Kenya in particular) ticket to stimulating the economy from the ground up. Governments are corrupt and policy is extremely slow and ineffective. Creating and facilitating an entrepreneurial mindset and ecosystem for people in these countries with the drive to create businesses which solve fundamental issues has got to be the way to sustainably get these countries out of poverty.

This is such huge topic and my paragraph above does not really even scratch the surface, but I want to write more often, in bite sized chunks going forward. For each of these issues, work needs to be done at both an infrastructural/country level and at a grass roots level. I believe that we will see quicker more effective results through bottom up initiatives so long as we are able to find and fund the scaleable and effective solutions at this level.

Next post will be about what type of investment could work for developing countries at this level.