While many experts grapple with the challenge of reforming foreign aid to achieve demonstrable results in economic development, Atlas Network is advancing an alternative philanthropic strategy that prioritizes the tacit knowledge, critical to systemic improvements, possessed by those in poverty over the technical knowledge of outsiders.
It’s time to do development differently. Poverty is best addressed through bottom-up reforms to establish economic rights so that the poor may lift themselves from poverty.
To establish those rights Atlas Network will work with local organizations in 90+ countries which are actively achieving reforms that track with poverty reduction. Thanks to a research agenda we are supporting, the relationship between score increases on Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World Report and the World Bank's Doing Business report and poverty reduction is now quantifiable. Our impact goal for our grantee portfolio is to reach a combined 1,000,000 people lifting themselves out of poverty.
With the success of our past work via projects funded by JTF and others, Atlas Network is prepared to scale up this development strategy to increase the number of reforms around the globe tied to poverty reduction. In October 2017, we launched a pilot version of a "Doing Development Differently" marketing campaign and grant opportunity with the goal of changing philanthropic conversations about the best way to help the poor.
We now seek funding to vastly expand awareness of "good news" that we are uniquely positioned to spread: that philanthropists CAN have a positive impact on global poverty by supporting "locally grown solutions to poverty." These are developed by civil society groups that understand the poor will lift themselves from poverty, after the removal of government-imposed barriers to opportunity.
