Let’s start with The Bottom Billion.

There’s been a tendency for people looking at global poverty to either emphasise the extraordinary difficulty in making a difference or to make it seem almost too easy. What I really liked about The Bottom Billion is that he acknowledges how difficult it can be to end poverty, but also offers some important ideas about how one can actually make a difference.

Is he critical of aid and NGOs?

No. Collier acknowledges that it’s often harder than it looks. He does cite, for example, a figure of money that was intended for rural health programmes in Chad: it turned out that 99 per cent of the money was lost along the way. But he also has a lot of admiration for groups that pay attention to local needs and have local ownership. He looks at what, realistically, the world can do – for example, by promoting trade, by reducing conflicts and wars in the developing world. It’s a very clear-minded, non-ideological look at what one can actually do to chip away at global poverty.

You say he has important ideas – is there one you’d particularly like to highlight?

I think one of the issues that the humanitarian world maybe hasn’t paid adequate attention to is the problem of conflict – in Africa in particular. This is something I’ve seen in my travels. You just can’t address poverty by building schools or building clinics in a country where warlords are running around burning schools and killing teachers. Also, conflict in poor countries tends to be incredibly contagious – it is devastating not only to that country but to surrounding countries. Collier argues, I think correctly, that this is a crucial issue, and that there are some things we can begin to do about it. Not in every case – but the West should try much harder to prevent conflicts before they happen, rather than just try to address them after they’ve already erupted, at which point it can be very difficult.

Collier really believes there is something we can do to reduce these conflicts?

Yes. For example, peacekeepers aren’t a magical solution by any means. But they’re pretty cheap compared to the $100 billion that is the cost of the average war in Africa. If one can spend $100 million on peacekeepers and it reduces the chance of a $100 billion war, that’s a pretty good investment. 

Let’s go on to your next book, David Bornstein’s How to Change the World.

One of the revolutions of the last ten or 20 years has been the rise of social entrepreneurship. This is beginning to bring the same kind of vision and efficiency into the social sector and to do-gooders as has traditionally existed in the world of business. I think David Bornstein has chronicled that rise of social entrepreneurship better than anyone. He also has a follow-up book that just came out, with Susan Davis, from Oxford University Press, called Social Entrepreneurship. It’s a much shorter book that’s also good. But How to Change the World really is the Bible for do-gooders and it’s just a terrific book.

What is a social entrepreneur?

A social entrepreneur is somebody who, like a business entrepreneur, has a new idea to solve a problem out there. But instead of trying to maximise profit, this person is trying to maximise improvement in the social condition. So, for example, one social entrepreneur that I know of was trying to address the number of women dying in childbirth in Africa. This person is an ob-gyn, so you would think she would immediately look at medical intervention. But she noticed that one of the big problems is that hospitals don’t have reliable electricity and you can’t do a C-section in the dark. So she ended up providing solar-powered surgery lights to a bunch of hospitals in Africa. It was very cheap and because it’s solar powered it also tends to be reasonably sustainable. The result has been that it saves lives, very cost effectively, in those hospitals. 

What about The Blue Sweater?

The Blue Sweater is a book by somebody who has really pioneered the use of business solutions to address poverty, Jacqueline Novogratz. Jacqueline emphasises not just charity, but how to start businesses that employ people and generate profits while also generating some kind of an improvement in the countries they operate in. For example, she is supporting a factory in East Africa that makes bed nets against malaria. 

It’s an account of her own life in the world of development, mostly in Africa, and it’s also got some lovely anecdotes. The title of the book comes from the fact that, as a child, Jacqueline had a blue sweater that she was very, very fond of, with her name written in the back of it. At some point a boy criticised it, and off it went to the pile of giveaways.