Interesting clip on Micro-loans

Africa's own Solutions One of my good friends showed me this interesting link on how to work with a group of people to help them work and help others help themselves.

It seems that one way to distribute malaria nets was to have the people see them as a status symbol, caring for their own Children. Interesting how using people's ideas can create new solutions to old problems. Openness like this really does enable creativity to flourish, especially when you give people the tools to solve their own problems then feeding them the answers. And when creativity flourishes... the things created tend to be so much better than we could ever plan.

For those of you not familiar with micro loans... they are small loans that enable people in developing countries start their own businesses... which they then repay. They are called micro because typically they are not larger than 200 US dollars.

I wonder how many things could be solved more simply if we had the people involved come up with the solution? Imagine having teachers fixing the school system instead of bureaucrats.... One of my friends from my Mission was extoling the benefits of having your children being schooled in Finland for some of the same reasons that things like micro loans work... if you help the people find solutions to their own problems, then you're not stuck solving them for the rest of their lives.