Barbara Waugh
12 September 2005
"The religion I grew up in had as one of its central tenets that the poor will always be with you," said Barbara Waugh, a director of university relations at Hewlett-Packard Company and a long-time radical activist. The weight of that notion cast a pall over her entire life. Then, one day, she read a book about a Bangladeshi man named Muhammad Yunus and his very simple idea for ending poverty: loaning the poorest of the poor small amounts of money so they could acquire an asset—a goat to milk, thread to weave—and start earning an income. Yunus’ ideas about microcredit changed her outlook completely.
"I suddenly got it. We don’t have to accept poverty," said Waugh. "Yunus turned banking upside down. He defined credit as a human right. The bottom line is he developed a business model for doing well by doing good. He married the business practices of the for-profit world with the values of non-profits for a hybrid that basically represents a third option that has the ability to generate profits for sponsoring organizations and on the other hand provides a sustainable living for the micro-entrepreneurs—the poor people."
"It isn’t just microcredit that will solve poverty. It’s innovative business people and philanthropists who are thinking outside their respective boxes and looking at the world’s biggest problems and finding business models to solve them. Once ending poverty is profitable, it will end. Now, the real innovation is to find the models."
"You can go so far with the altruistic, human reflex, but it’s only gotten us as far as we are, which isn’t, by a long shot, far enough. What happened to me is when I got inside the corporate world I saw how much could be done with the profit motive. I think greed is more dependable than altruism. If ending poverty can satisfy someone’s greed, you’ll get a lot further than by satisfying their altruism. I’ll give my leftovers and used goods to the poor: that’s good. But it’s not enough."
"Hewlett-Packard, for example, gives far and above the benchmark philanthropically. But if we could actually have our business be about solving the world’s biggest problem, we’d do far more good than by our philanthropy."
"The world will reward the companies that help solve the world’s problems. We’re a technology company. There are six billion people and technology is only hitting the top two billion. If you want to grow new markets, you’ve got to look at the four billion at the bottom of the economic pyramid."
"I think it takes enormous energy to shield ourselves from the pain of others. It takes less energy to open our hearts and do something. Fundamentally, for me, it’s about my own happiness. I look at starving children and haunted mothers and it ruins my day. It ruins my life. It makes me fundamentally very depressed. We become numb by these inane rationalizations we have for poverty. But it doesn’t work. So, try plan B: use your enormous intelligence and gifts and see what you can do to end poverty."
