Navigating Between Extremes: Academics Helping to Eradicate Global Poverty

This essay is divided into three parts. In the following section I attempt to extract from the work of academics, researchers, and policy-makers in the “world of development” what we know and have learned about how best to accelerate the process of reducing extreme poverty, including what does not work. Against this backdrop, the next section discusses different ways that academics from outside the professional development community might effectively contribute to the faster or more effective eradication of global poverty. It considers in particular some current knowledge gaps in the development field that might be bridged by academics from the fields of moral and political philosophy, building on work that is already being done, some of which has not been sufficiently noticed by development practitioners. Finally, I discuss briefly the types of antipoverty organizations that concerned individuals might support, and include a checklist of questions to help assess their approaches, strengths, and weaknesses.

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