Think Positive, Climb Out of Poverty? It Just Might Work

By Seema Jayachandran | July 16, 2018

“Believe in yourself and in your future” may sound like a vapid self-help mantra. But there is growing evidence that it can be used as an anti-poverty strategy.

Consider three experiments on three continents aimed at enhancing the self-worth of poor people.

In Kampala, Uganda, students who watched a feel-good movie about a chess prodigy improved their academic results. In Oaxaca, Mexico, clients of a microcredit organization were successfully trained to have greater aspirations for the future. And in Kolkata, India, sex workers in brothels were imbued with a sense of empowerment that helped them to take concrete steps to improve their lives.

While poverty can induce hopelessness, setting off a vicious cycle, modest interventions that instill a sense of hope can sometimes lead to remarkable improvements, recent research shows.

In Kampala, for example, a study by Emma Riley, a graduate student at the University of Oxford in Britain, examined the effects on students of watching a movie, “Queen of Katwe,” starring Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo. The Disney movie is based on the life of Phiona Mutesi, a girl from a poor township in Kampala, whose father died of AIDS when she was young.

Mutesi went on to become a champion chess player, representing Uganda in international competitions, an achievement that exceeded what many students in Uganda had expected for themselves or even thought possible.

To encourage them to aim higher, students preparing for their national exams were shown the movie. When they took the exams, they performed better than a control group that instead watched a Hollywood fantasy movie, “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” that did not feature an appropriate role model. Significantly more of the “Queen of Katwe” movie watchers had scores high enough to gain admission to a public university.

That a brief exposure to an inspirational story transformed even a few lives in a measurable way strikes me as remarkable.

In the experiment in Oaxaca, conducted by two U.S. economists, another film was shown. This time, it was a documentary, and 326 indigenous women who were eligible for small loans from a community bank watched it. The women in the film were also community bank clients, and the documentary showed how they used a loan to expand their businesses.

The 326 women in the study participated in a four-week “hope curriculum” in which they set their own goals, discussed them and visualized how they would lift themselves from poverty. The program succeeded in improving the participants’ outlooks and raising their aspirations, though it isn’t clear that it did much, over the short term, at least, to increase their incomes.

The Kolkata experiment, conducted by five scholars based in Britain and India, ran a short course on personal growth for 264 sex workers, who had often felt stigmatized and powerless. After participating, the women had measurably greater self-esteem and a stronger belief that they could determine the course of their lives. More concretely, they began saving more money and getting more frequent health checkups.

These successes suggest that even traditional anti-poverty programs work partly because they lift people up psychologically. For example, a program designed by a nonprofit in Bangladesh that has also been used in India, Ethiopia, Peru and other countries has given poor people livestock, plus training on how to care for the animals.

This aid package has raised participants’ incomes more than might have been expected, based on the direct monetary value of the animals and the education. What helps to explain the outsize impact is that participants started working more hours.

Critics of anti-poverty aid have charged that it encourages laziness, but in this case, the opposite happened. The assistance motivated people to work harder. The extra work was partly a rational calculation: Productive assets like cows or goats magnified the payoff from labor. But it’s also true that participants’ mental health improved, which likely made them able to work more.

Better mental health is also one of the striking benefits of the cash grants that the U.S. nonprofit GiveDirectly has given to poor households in Kenya. Recipients said they felt happier, and when they were given a large enough grant, their level of cortisol — a stress hormone — fell. Improved mental health and lower stress levels not only enabled people to work more, it also empowered participants to make better decisions, such as to take up profitable long-term investment opportunities.

Other studies have found that the psychological dimension has been important in the results achieved by Compassion International, a Christian nonprofit that runs a child sponsorship program in countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In that program, donors give children money to cover education and health care. The children also attend spiritual instruction after school and exchange periodic letters with their sponsors. The studies have found that sponsored children complete more years of education than others and, later in life, earn higher incomes. Children in the program also aspire to achieve more in school and their careers and tend to have a sunnier outlook on life.

Hope isn’t a cure-all. In none of these examples can we be certain that it actually explains the gains in people’s income or education. And instilling hope without skills or financial resources is unlikely to be enough to lift people out of poverty.

Optimism helped the children supported by Compassion International succeed in school, but the donor money that paid their school fees mattered. The “hope curriculum” in Oaxaca raised participants’ hopes but may not be eliminating their poverty.

Moreover, while moderately high aspirations can provide crucial motivation, unrealistically high aspirations can be so discouraging that they are harmful. Repeatedly falling short can deplete motivation.

Still, it is welcome news that poverty-alleviation programs can amplify the good they do just by making a better life seem — and actually be — within reach.

© 2018 New York Times News Service