Imagine living on less than $2 a day. You cannot afford health care, a car, a college education, housing repairs, new clothes, take-out pizzas, or trips to the movie theater - not even your daily caffeine fix. By living below the poverty line, a person's life is stripped of hope. Opportunity is replaced with a desperate need to survive. Nearly half of the world's population lives below the internationally defined poverty line of less than $2 per day.

Despite the billions of dollars spent on improving rural living standards, progress has proven slow. In part, this is because many projects perpetuate dependency by not truly empowering communities to become self-reliant. An elegantly designed plan to generate income is useless when residents never had the motivation or ability to overcome inevitable obstacles to begin with.

In other cases, projects don't address the core problems of the community, which is true, for example, for those that give microcredit without considering the participants' organizational and critical thinking skills or confidence level. When these issues aren't addressed, a baker doesn't know how to manage her supplies or market her product, and a woodworker can't maintain product quality or sustainably harvest wood. The potential for success exists, but it is unrealized because communities are not encouraged to think for themselves, or they simply lack the skills to do so. Until poor communities acquire these skills, they'll remain unable to break the cycle of poverty that has existed for generations.

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