Customer Reviews

In the River They Swim: Essays from Around the World on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(34)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"In The River They Swim" is a collection of essays written by men and women directly involved in efforts to address poverty in developing countries. The book emphasizes a needed paradigm shift away from poverty relief toward wealth creation. Relieving poverty is a short-term solution. Economic development is the route to lifting the citizenry of developing countries out of hardship. Governments and aide agencies need to provide resources to encourage and nurture an entrepreneurial spirit that will move developing countries away from dependence on foreign aid. Developing countries must learn to compete in the global marketplace.

The book's essays emphasize a new paradigm for addressing poverty. The second and third parts of the book provide suggestions for concrete approaches. The book is actually a collection of case studies illustrating successes and failures. Even those addressing poverty at the local level are likely to find this book enlightening. How we view a problem will determine how we attempt to solve it. What we focus on is what we get. "In The River They Swim" urges that we take our focus off of poverty relief and concentrate on prosperity creation.

In the River They Swim is a collections of essays by local leaders in less developed countries. The concepts presented are varied, but all unite under the umbrella of brainstorming solutions for managing the massive problems inherent in any program that seeks to improve the conditions of society in the less developed regions of the world.

The essays are scholarly and well defined. They are written by experienced local people who understand the problems, the culture, and the barriers to progress. Many of the concepts appear new because previous publications on this topic have mostly focused on the point of view of well intentioned people in the developed world.

Several concepts are very interesting. First, several essays mention that "entrepreneurship" and "private sector" initiatives will work best. Most of these authors explain that charity from the developed world needs to support local initiatives rather that dictate solutions that emerge from outside opinions.

One author discusses the "cultural divide" that he must "ride" to function in an atmosphere of apparent cultural conflict. He sees challenges that divide people on the basis of culture, social status, generational differences and even accent. He also suggests that often the attitudes of the local elite hinder the development of new ideas.

Several authors emphasize that local firms must improve their competitiveness to be of assistance to the development of their society. In general wealth creation must be emphasized. In addition "mental walls", such as "all initiatives must come from the government", act as barriers to economic progress and must be eliminated.

In the River They Swim is a very different book. I enjoyed reading these essays. They reveal a picture of life in these countries that is very different from what I expected. I recommend these essays for anyone interested in learning about the less developed world.

This collection of essays on the economic issues surrounding the developing world was entertaining, inspiring and enlightening. The general theme of the essays is that the problems of the developing world may need to be looked at in a different way - in a way where the goal is the development of sustainable wealth, innovation, entrepreneurship and environmental stewardship.

The premise of continual humanitarian aid has created a dependency and lack of innovation that drains the spirit of the developing world to transform itself. The comparisons between Korea and Venezualea were striking as two nations that began from similar economic positions, and where the country with limited natural resources was able to mobilize its people to excel, the other relied on natural resources and easy money and shows no sustainable improvement.

The essays bring the plight and promise of the developing world to the fore, and certainly give us reason to examine our approach, and question what type of help will be best to ensure sustainable, enterprise level solutions to the problem of world poverty.

For forty-five years I've been paid to write. Writing, I've learned, is harder than typing. And for twenty-five years I've advised leaders about organizational change, realizing all along that changing minds is even harder than changing words (I couldn't edit the State of Montana or rewrite General Motors). More recently, I've worked in healthcare and economic systems in Africa. Africa has reminded me that changing cultures is even harder than changing minds.

No wonder I'm so taken with IN THE RIVER THEY SWIM. It's a smart book echoing with the voices of exceptional people on the frontlines of international development. Each speaks with clear authority, most with surprising modesty. All offer something worth hearing.

The editors' choice to do an anthology of essays -- personal, reflective, sometimes confessional -- was courageous. It's easy to make a mess of such books. The typical error is that editors, in search of a smooth-reading tome, iron out all differences between contributors, plucking the peculiar turn of phrase from one and the quirky verb choice from another, until they've drained the power of personality that gives essays punch. Not here. In this work, voices and personalities enjoy free rein. Elizabeth Hooper, for instance, looks at the end of her academic work and pleads for intellectual integration; her writing sparkles with the certainty of a youthful scholar. Compare Hooper's voice to that of the Soldier-President of Rwanda, His Excellency Paul Kagame, who rises proudly from the bloodied hills of his nation to slow those wanting to rush in to help: "No one can assume that he or she knows better than we what is good for us..." (p 14).

The editors have no apparent allegiance to the U.S. evangelical community, but they offered Pastor Rick Warran of Purpose fame the right to introductory pages of the book. For some, he seems a strange bedfellow. But allowing his voice to be heard first, laced with biblical injunctions, proves the truth of this book: No one has all the answers, and no one willing to search for them should be silenced.

The book drips with authenticity. The contributors' experience has battered their confidence in conventional wisdom and simple answers. Example? The reigning belief that international aid will yield economic development is (graciously) skewered by, among others, Malik Fal. Fal, an African and a Microsoft executive, observes that "after a few years of immediate humanitarian assistance," unless policies shift from aid to entrepreneurship, the "whole approach becomes a self-induced dependency..." (p 92). Conventional wisdom proves not to be very wise, and alternative answers are decidedly not simple.

For me, two essays stood tallest, perhaps because they speak to the question that has most plagued me: If a blend of compassion and capital is not the answer, what is?

The response offered by Michael Fairbanks' thoughtful (and funny) essay, "That's My Duck!", is that there is no single answer. There are only answers, plural. Leaders need to sift through the rubble of poverty, find available assets and options, listen to others (especially those who differ), then perform the alchemy of blending responses that will bend the culture toward innovation and independence. Always, the response will be shaped by and to the culture. Either that or, always, it will fail.

Fairbanks and David Rabkin have bloodied themselves in battles with global change and their experience produced the moving chapter, "Our Greatest Fear." Perhaps because I'm in my seventh decade of life; perhaps because I've entertained a deadly disease that raised doubts about my own worth -- whatever the reason, the brutal candor with which the authors address their own fears hooked me. They open with "One of the great fears a man can have is becoming the kind of person that he used to, as a younger man, make fun of..." (p 196). They recount travels "to more than fifty countries in the name of building more prosperous companies in the developing world" (p 197), only to arrive at the fear that "[w]e make small sacrifices along the way...because the alternative is too hard. Eventually, we lose not only our ability to accomplish positive change but, we would argue, our integrity. As a result, we have all ended up in a collective hypocrisy, leaving us short of our ideals, missing historic opportunity, and leaving poverty safely intact" (p 204).

Changing cultures is hard business. I've tried it. I know the cold, gaunt look of failure, and the pleasure I've taken at the most microscopic suggestion of success. I've known this was tough ever since, in the middle of my civil-rights era 40 years ago, I read T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"): "We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves; yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace..." (Introduction to THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM).

IN THE RIVER THEY SWIM is destined to become a landmark in the field of global economic development. It speaks to our minds but also to our hearts. By flashing brilliance clothed in humility, novel solutions swimming in murky questions -- and especially in their candor about the grinding difficulty of changing cultures -- the contributors have answered Lawrence's dismal epitaph. In voices of hope from the globe's most desolate frontiers, they have refused to make their peace with failure.

It is no pleasure giving a negative review to a book of essays written by some of the most compassionate and dedicated people on the planet, but I do find it necessary to swim against the strong tide of positive reviews this book has generated. As someone who has worked with economic and/or political refugees here in the United States, I picked up this book with much anticipation and interest. Moving through the twenty-nine essays, I found much in the way of compassion and dedication, much less in the way of enlightenment.

The literature on how best to aid developing countries, and on the failures and foibles of public and private sector attempts to participate in the endeavor to lift such countries out of poverty, is voluminous. From Marx to Newt Gingrich, everyone has a solution. What I had hoped for with this book was a unifying principal, a plan with a track record, a pragmatic, ideologically untainted road ahead. In the River They Swim succeeds in other respects (more on this in a moment), but fails at all of the above.

The tone of this book, starting with an introduction by the author of The Purpose Driven Life, is often that blend of religion and capitalism (enterpreneurism is the word most frequently used) that for better or for worse has brought the economy of the Western world to where it is today: incredibly successful at growth, incredibly destructive of the environment, often destructive of the human spirit. I can hear the retort now "More destructive of the human spirit than starving to death or a life of grinding poverty?" No. But there are better ways of moving forward than reproducing a model that appears to have become most bankrupt where it was most successful.

The book approaches a blog-like quality, right down to having frequent bloggers mixed in with those who only write occasionally. Often a chapter is personal musing about what it is like to work in a developing nation. One essay compares economic intervention to the rules of good psychological counseling learned long ago from a favorite priest/professor. Others talk about their personal awakening to the fact that local people have a better understanding of their needs than expert foreigners arriving on the scene. Highly anecdotal and personal in nature, many of the chapters entertain, but fall short on paradigm shifting revelation.

From a business perspective, the quality of the advice comes close to being a long list of platitudes. You will learn that it is best to adapt to local culture. You will discover that people with a product to sell should come to an understanding of their customers. You will find that the truly successful enterprise understands its business from the point of origin to the point of distribution. These are basic business principles, developing nation or otherwise.

Who will like this book? People that enjoy stories of hope, and stories about people that are not just TALKING about making the world a better place, but are actually out there DOING it.

Who will be less enthusiastic? Those that are looking for the tool that will smash the contricting bonds that paralyze the developing nations. Those bonds, I suspect, are political and cultural in nature. Civil rights, empowerment of women, containable corruption, stable legal systems, access to education appear to be pre-conditions to sustainable reduction of poverty. In the River They Swim gives short shrift to the macro changes that are desperately needed, and long shrift to individual stories about how to market the long green raisins of Afghanistan to its neighbor, India.

In the end, it is unlikely that a book whose first line is "Poverty is a spiritual issue", and contains essays entitled "My Faith in Capitalism" (capitalism and religious faith must walk hand in hand), will have a substantial impact on addressing desperate poverty. But it will, indeed, make you feel warmth in your heart for those who are putting their lives into the battle against soul-shattering deprivation.

To start, I am not a big book reader so I look for books that can keep my attention. What I liked about this particular one is that it is composed of many various stories to keep your focus. It can easily be read in one sitting or you can read it over a period of time without missing a beat.

The chapters themselves are all about business and poverty to say the least and has many great contributions by world figures like the President of Rwanda as well as the former Chief of Finance of Afghanistan. I think the book can really be best summed up by reading the forward written by Dr. Rick Warren who writes:

"[The authors] develop new models of business where the workers' wages increase and where the value of each human being is recognized by both managers and shareholders. This is not just good business practice; it is the way to positively impact people, our environment, and future generations."

That's the sole purpose of this book. It's not a book that everyone will pick up and read. I for example love business and world events so the book did spark some interest to me. My wife however is a big Robert Frost poetry lover and the content of this book definitely is not for her.

In the end, I would recommend this book to the business reader. It's one of those to put on the bookshelf and to pick up and reread it down the road over and over as there are many great lessons to be learned. One such lesson in this book is written by Kenneth Hynes when he gives a lesson on consumer demand. He writes

"The importance of understanding and meeting consumer preferences highlights the limitations of a purely macroeconomic approach to development. Concepts like total factor productivity are important, but you first have to make a product that someone wants to buy."

Okay, I'm reviewing this for Amazon's Vine program, and I was overwhelmed by this one. This was a book that I took a chance on, and what I found out was that global politics are extremely complicated, even though the solution - "models of business where the workers' wages increase and where the value of each human being is recognized by both managers and shareholders" - seems foolishly simple. (This book, by the way, is a great companion to the suspense fiction of John Robison; this socio-economic text provides a great context for reading his fiction.) I was out of my depth on this (the author advises heads of state, for goodness' sake), a collection of essays, written by the likes of President Kagame of Rwanda, Inter-American Development Bank President Luis Alberto Moreno, and even the author himself who is highly touted for his congenial but serious drive to help Rwanda and other countries who have their same sort of problems. What I will say is this: if you have in interest in where the direction of multicultural economics is headed (this book seems to suggest that there is more potential for economic stimulation in Africa than in China, for instance), Africa and how its people are suffering under immense daily economic privation the likes of which I have never known, or what to educate yourself about a side of life that you probably don't know, this would be a great place to start.

This book contains a series of essays by individuals, all experts in their fields (political leaders, academics, business and international banking executives, among others) who have hands-on, experiential knowledge of the world's most monumental problem -- how to create wealth for the poorest people in the world.

As it is about nontraditional solutions, I was rather taken aback to see that a mainstream religious leader, Dr. Rich Warren, had been invited to contribute the book's Foreword. I would have thought a more iconoclastic religious figure would have been more fitting to introduce the book's theme. However, upon reading the aforethought dubious Foreward, I changed my mind. It was exactly to the point, informative and extremely interesting. Dr. Warren lived up fully to the task at hand.

What is presented overall are new models of enterprise solutions to provery, and wealth creation (fostering self-sufficiency), rather than poverty reduction (depending on handouts) are the keywords to freedom from the past economics-based abstractions which have proved to be ineffective.

Particularly moving for me is the book's first essay entitled "The Backbone of a New Rwanda," provided by H. E. President Paul Kagame, Republic of Rwanda, one of the most progressive leaders on the continent. In the old Rwanda, he led the revolution to end the genocide. He expressly states that the goal for his country is to create prosperity for the average Rwandan citizen.

Every essay is pertinent and fascinating just because every essayist did what the title describes: they didn't read about the global problem, they didn't observe it from a safe distance. They truly jumped "In the River," swam, and are swimming still. Now their efforts need to trickle down to those going without food for weeks at a time in the Kikuyu tribal villages in the Central Highlands of Kenya who watch their goats and cattle starve because during droughts they have no fodder to give them, and the remote villages of Burkina Faso where the sole fare is millet, twice a day in winter and once daily in the summer, and where the majority of children will never see the inside of any school. These are the real testing grounds where the proof has got to be ultimately in the pudding.

This remarkable book should not only satisfy but overwhelm anyone who has a concern about this urgent matter.

I picked this book because I am interested in development - how NGOs, governments, communities and individuals can address the grinding misery of poverty in our world.

This book has some interesting thoughts about poverty, development, capitalism and the role faith can or does play in this, and it might be of interest to a casual observer who just wants to know a few things here or there or get a few ideas. But it isn't a well-collected group of essays. There isn't much of a theme, there is no sense that these essays all come together for a purpose other than "they have some good ideas" about how people might address poverty or they want to share reflections about poverty and development. And it is very pro-capitalism and pro-business without necessarily taking seriously the challenge that these paradigms pose to addressing poverty - and without taking seriously enough the ways that these paradigms have contributed to poverty and inequality.

There are LOTS of ideas out there and lots of personal stories. What is needed is a compelling theme about how the zillions of ideas might be combed over and somehow actualized into an approach a decent track record.

I guess this is a great book for people who want to read various hopeful or interesting stories about development and poverty and change. It is not so much a book for people who are in the field or really interested in doing something themselves or taking meaningful action toward addressing the ways that the lifestyles and approaches of the "developed" world to the "developing world" have caused and continue to worsen the problem.

In short, a good book for light reading, for those who already agree with the tenets of the book or who don't know enough about the field to disagree with them.

I loved the format of this book. It is a collection of essays from many different people, including presidents, executives and others from different backgrounds and cultures. Each essay presents not only what each person thinks is a way to help the poor but also the lessons that person learned about what works and what does not.
Charity is discussed as a way to solve immediate needs but not as a long sustainable solution and is not the main theme of the book. Instead, each essay concentrates more on long-term sustainable solutions. I particularly enjoyed a quote by pope John Paul II cited in one essay which asks people to see the poor as potential waiting to be unleashed.