Bill Gates vs. Mother Theresa

So there is an age-old debate – who really impacted the world more, or did better for the world with their work, Bill Gates or Mother Theresa? Does the fact that Bill Gates created millions of jobs over the years all over the word, driven by concepts like profits and revenues, make him any less noble than Mother Theresa who worked in orphanages and saved children? Who did more ‘good’ for the world?

We struggle with this issue while here. Everyday, our primary mission is to make this factory work. It provides jobs to the local community. Its existence provides a market for local cashew farmers who in theory will now be more likely to produce more higher-quality cashews, earning more money, and therefore providing more to their families. If the cashews stay locally, again, this provides more jobs and more times that each shilling will turn a hand, creating a more robust economic environment. While this is all good, we’re also here trying to help the owner of the factory to make money. Somewhere, at some point, someone decided that one way to help the world is to make it more money-incentive driven. Probably a correct assumption. People are always motivated by money and if you can make it or use it and as a side benefit help the society in the process, it’s probably more likely to work. One can say that non-profit organizations, NGO’s and other such institutions often suffer from not having enough business acumen and motivation to work efficiently and effectively, and if they were actually motivated more, they would work better and have a great impact.

However, in my mind, it should also not be all about money. Should this factory actually work at some point properly and should this specific brand of cashews establish itself with full distribution, it’s essentially going to take all the small entrepreneurs, these little ladies who process cashews at home and sell at the local market, out of business. In theory, this means that they should find something else to do that they can do more efficiently than cashews. If the entrepreneur can process cashews at a lower cost, then the theory should work that he should process them and others who process them more expensively should find something else to do. The problem with the theory is that there is not much else for these ladies to do. So while we are creating jobs in one way, are we destroying livelihoods in another way?

When I volunteered several years ago in a Tibetan Refugee Camp in India, I worked with kids everyday teaching them practical skills. Although I’m working much harder now on this project, teaching kids appeared more rewarding than trying to make money. But how much impact did I have with those 20 kids as opposed to hopefully creating several hundreds of jobs and lifting some cashew farmers out of subsistence farming into more rewarding livelihood? We struggle with this, particularly since it seems to me that eventually our work may play a role in destroying some livelihoods as well, as capitalism rears its unforgiving head.