Blog Action Day: What Can We Do About Poverty?

Today is Blog Action Day 2008, and the theme is ‘Poverty’, with thousands of blogs around the world making an organized effort to raise awareness about global poverty and ways to fight it.

Unfortunately, as much wealth as we have in the Arab world, we have even more poverty, with people in various Arab countries barely making ends meet, many of them living under the poverty line.

With StartUpArabia being a project covering internet and technology startups and entrepreneurship in the Arab world, I thought I’d try to tackle the issue of poverty from the point of view of what we in this Arab startup scene can do.

Entrepreneurs involved with launching new startups know how it feels to have to bootstrap, to have so little money for them and their startups to live on, and they know how much they have to rely on the community and their network of friends and family to get through the day and make things start to happen.

I’m not likening the early days of a startup to poverty, far from it, all I’m trying to do is establish an order of magnitude; if those early days were bad, then imagine what a person who is living under the poverty line, who has no hope of things getting any better, and who can barely feed his family to get them through the day feels. Definitely and obviously so so much worse.

And the thing is that for the solution, things point back to the community and its efforts as well as the best way to help. The community can help fight poverty through people lending a hand, sharing, giving back to the community, investing in a better future for everyone.

So, what can we do?

• Well there is no lack of organizations and foundations in all countries of the Arab world that are dedicated to fighting poverty, through a variety of programs, and that we can support in several different ways or make donations to.
• Startups by nature are a great way to create new jobs as they grow, choosing to hire the qualified person who needs the job the most, and giving them a way to enhance their income and cover their living is a great way to help.
• Raise awareness about poverty through our different services and websites, and convincing people to play a bigger role.
• Use online microloan service like Kiva.org, MicroPlace, Prosper, Zopa, or GlobeFunder to help people around the world finance their small projects to get themselves out of poverty.

Finally, I thought I’d share with you a great list of 30 simple ways to battle povery with technology that I came across today and thought could come in handy and inspire some people on how they could contribute.