

In Silicon Valley the term “hacker” has evolved to connote high praise for someone particularly creative, ingenious and adept at finding clever new ways to accomplish a difficult task. It’s with that framework in mind, rather than some of the other meanings that “hack” usually represents, that I suggested during my recent TEDx talk that Pope Francis and the UN are hackers of poverty.
Global poverty qualifies as a difficult task. It must be, because even with all the money spent on helping to lift people out of poverty — an estimated $150 billion in 2013 alone — 4 billion of the world’s nearly 7.5 billion people still live on an average of less than $4 a day.
And here are some other daunting statistics on the effects of poverty:
1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water.
These ill effects of poverty are likely to get only worse, due to three trends:
Unfortunately, attempts so far to alleviate poverty — typically in the form of centralized, official development or government assistance — are not working. That’s where the “hacking poverty” idea emerges. What would a poverty hacker do differently?
The most successful distributed system to date is mobile technology. With 6.8 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, more people on the planet have access to mobile phones than to toilets. Using this near ubiquity of mobile technology, poverty hackers are changing the economics of poverty through new strategies for investments, loans and credit. Already, mobile money in the global south is leapfrogging the global north’s centralized banking paradigm.
Social entrepreneurship is proving its worth throughout the developing world by applying established business principles and practices to poverty-related issues. Unlike top-down aid approaches, social entrepreneurship fosters and supports solutions created within communities of poor and marginalized people, making those solutions more likely to be adopted and sustained over time.
Social enterprises are hacking poverty by revolutionizing how energy and food are provided in the developing world, and also how solutions are financed, distributed and sold — and by shifting the economic dynamics toward the poor themselves.
Where do Pope Francis and the United Nations fit into this conversation about hacking poverty? The pope’s recent Laudato Si’ encyclical, and the recent UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), echo the same messages and call for essentially the same outcomes: The system is broken. It needs to be hacked.
Pope Francis and the U.N. SDGs provide guidelines for how we can do things differently, more creatively, more effectively. Now, it’s up to all of us to follow through and take action — to become hackers of poverty in whatever ways we can. There’s literally no time to waste.
