Extreme poverty
Lift the ~700 million people living on less than $2.15 a day into stable prosperity.
The scale of it
people in extreme poverty (below $2.15/day)
The capital on it
Total ODA as the proxy for anti-poverty capital; only a slice is direct cash transfers or growth-oriented investment. 2025 donor budget cuts (US, UK, others) turned the trend down.
source: OECD DAC — official development assistance (2024 preliminary) · confidence med · estimate, improvable by PR
The prize at the limit
The company that profitably brings the bottom billion into the productive economy — payments, credit, and productivity rails — captures a Visa-scale toll on a vast new flow of economic activity it helped create.
comparable: Visa/Mastercard ($400-500B) for the next billion · confidence low · a ceiling, not a forecast
The trade: demand is high, only $212B/yr of capital is flowing (0.4× its fair share), and the prize at the limit is $500B. This is a Request for Startups and a Request for Investors at once.
The summary lives here. The full whitepaper walks through the four-axis ranking, existing alternatives, proposed direction, cost & scale, and suggested investors — in the spirit of Hyperloop Alpha.
Severity · WTP / wealth
share of affected person’s wealth they would pay for a solution
Priority score
21
importance × urgency, 0–100
Importance
60
humans affected × severity, gated by market
Urgency
35
direction of travel + solution gap
Neglectedness
4/10Large aid flows exist, but the most evidence-backed tools (direct cash transfers, growth-enabling reform) are still underused relative to their proven returns.
medTractability
8/10Among the most rigorously evidenced causes anywhere: randomized trials show cash transfers and public-health interventions reliably raise incomes and save lives.
highWays to help
Build fintech and identity rails that reach the unbanked at near-zero cost.
Development economics, randomized evaluation, or global-health delivery.
Organizations
- GiveDirectlynonprofit
- World Bankdata / finance
- J-PALresearch
People to follow
- Esther Duflodevelopment economist, MIT / J-PAL
- Rory Stewartpresident, GiveDirectly
Three-lens scoring
Extreme poverty is the canonical proof that humanity can solve its biggest problems: the share of people living below the international poverty line fell from ~38% in 1990 to under 9% before the pandemic, the fastest decline in human history. The unfinished work is concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and fragile states, where economic growth, direct cash transfers, and proven public-health interventions still have enormous, measurable returns.
Companies on this quest
0 mappedNo companies mapped yet. Known gap.
Capital funding this quest
0 allocatorsNo allocators mapped yet. Known gap.
Writing about this right now
full feed →No coverage logged yet. The next ingest cron will populate this.