Published in Newsweek, Oct. 8, 2026
I have a question for the people who control billions of dollars in poverty funding. How many lives actually changed as a result?
The question sounds simple. It is anything but. The World Bank estimates that 824.3 million people—about one in 10 people worldwide—were living in extreme poverty in 2024.
Progress has slowed to a crawl in many of the places that need it most. After decades of international aid, development programs, and increasingly sophisticated impact reports, we should be willing to ask whether we have become better at measuring poverty than escaping it.
I have spent years living and working alongside people in some of the poorest communities in Africa. I went there thinking I would help a village.
Instead, I found myself asking a much more basic question about individual people. What does each of them need? What would actually make tomorrow different from today?
Poverty is too often viewed as a program. A subsection of society. But it is, in fact, individual lives, millions of them, each shaped by family, culture, leadership, education, opportunity, habits, and belief.
Money is part of that equation. It is rarely the entire equation.
I have watched organizations become consumed by metrics because funders demand them. How many businesses were created? How much revenue did those businesses generate? How many dollars were deployed?
The Numbers We Should Care About
Let me ask a different question. Can a mother now feed her children twice a day? Can she send all of them to school in the same year? Can she make a decision about her own life because she has enough income to withstand saying no to someone who would otherwise exploit her?
Those are the numbers I care about.
I know an organization that employs several people solely to measure impact. One metric it tracks is the combined revenue generated by businesses its participants have created. It sounds impressive in a funding report.
I struggle to see why it should impress anyone standing in a home where a mother still cannot afford to feed her children.
We have imported the language of corporate performance into human development and then congratulated ourselves for becoming more rigorous.
The irony is painful. We can spend millions proving that we have done something while failing to prove that somebody is living differently.
Small Successes
I have seen how small the starting point can be. A simple cone garden can help a poor family grow food and generate additional income, or a basic system for saving small amounts of money can change how a household manages its future.
Small successes can create something that no grant application can manufacture on demand: agency.
A person may say, perhaps for the first time, “I can do this.”
I cannot give away enough money to get someone permanently out of poverty. No amount is sufficient if the person remains dependent on the next intervention. Eventually, they must own the change.
We should also be honest about the damage a short-lived intervention can leave behind. A large program arrives with money, promises, hopes, and expectations. People invest their trust.
Then the funding disappears, the organization leaves, and the promised transformation evaporates. The next outsider who arrives may find people understandably skeptical. We have taught them that aid comes with an expiration date.
A Stubborn Problem
The World Bank’s latest data tells us how stubborn the problem remains. Yet the world has also demonstrated that poverty can fall dramatically when people, who believe they can change their lives, gain access to economic opportunity, education, infrastructure, and functioning institutions.
The challenge is knowing which investments create lasting change and having the discipline to stay with them.
Here is where I think the aid industry needs to turn its thinking upside down.
Stop asking how much money a program can spend, and start asking how little money it can take to produce a lasting change in someone’s life.
Stop rewarding organizations for leaving impressive footprints, and reward the ones whose work people can carry forward after the outsiders leave.
And stay long enough to earn trust.
Moving Human Lives
Culture does not change on a grant cycle. Mindsets do not transform because a funding period ended. People need time to practice new habits, see them work, teach them to their children, and eventually make them part of ordinary life.
The people living in poverty already have something development programs sometimes overlook. They have an extraordinary incentive to improve their lives and the lives of their children. Our job should be to remove the obstacles standing between that incentive and its expression.
Billions of dollars will continue to move through the global fight against poverty. The question is whether we will keep measuring the movement of the money or will we demand evidence that it moved a human life.
Show me what you can do with $20,000 before you ask me to trust you with $20 million. Then show me the person whose life changed. That should be the standard.
Virgil Hughes is the founder of NewVines International (NVI), a faith-based nonprofit providing financial education, business training, microloans and related development programs in African communities.
The views expressed in this article are his own.
