Socially responsible investing or Corporate Social Responsibility also known as sustainable, socially-conscious, or ethical investing and approaches, describe alternative ways to maximize both financial return and social good for peoples and nations. Typical areas will include the environment, social justice, and corporate governance. An area that has become more compelling – more so in recent times and linked possibly to unrests all over the globe is Poverty Eradication. This is not just about donations to poor nations but rather helping them get back on their feet …in a sustainable economic model that works for them in the medium to long term.

Acts 3 [6]  Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.

The Peruvian society made some progress in this regard when in the 80s, after battling for years with terrorism, averted crisis by focusing on bringing the impoverished and the poor “into the system” i.e. working at eliminating extralegal societies through a revamp of their governance approach.

Fresh thinking and investment is needed to realign the governance of most developing countries to progressively eliminate these extralegal arms by integrating them into the formal legal structures and revisiting institutional arrangements to help the less advantaged segments emerge as a meaningful part of society – still fully recognising their educational and traditional limitations.

Deuteronomy 15 [11] For the poor shall never cease out of the land…

One of the reasons for the continued poverty of a large proportion of the rural population is that the system not only does not work for them, but works against them. To cope with this situation, these poor but hard working and entrepreneurial people create their own extra-judicial systems to survive out of the system. These systems add up to a complex but powerful “extra-legal” form which in many cases is more real to those who believe this is their only means of survival. For example, many people who live, own and survive on a piece of land through traditional family/community arrangements do not hold the title to that land/property. Hence they do not get the usual benefits like loans and registration of their business. Disputes are always easy to stir up and reliance on oral and community traditions make them even more vulnerable. In order to survive, they are forced to create their own rules, and live within their own system and forge strong but subtle underground and extralegal alliances to protect their interests. They have their own system on how to manage licenses, how to get married, how to raise a family, how to enforce their contracts. In most developing countries, the extra-legal society can represent the majority of the country.  In Peru 98% of all businesses were extra-legal. They constructed most buildings, managed almost all of public transportation.  Some would call these the informal sector.

Eugen Huber created a single legal system in Switzerland. He made the law simple enough for common people to understand. He went to the grassroots to find out what people understood to be the truth i.e. what they believed in. He created a bottom up process. The wealth owned collectively by poor people is huge, but is very fragmented. The solution was to amend the laws from inside, and to make the elites understand that changing this situation will reduce terrorism, create and open up vast markets within the country itself. Revisions on systems related to property rights, access to capital, and capability to reach external markets now allowed poor people to generate wealth.

One observes a misguided conclusion that the poor are looking for democracy … and that the crises in the Middle-East or in any dictatorship will be solved mainly by a supply of the right dose of democracy…But what we continue to see is that democracy is only a tool that works with other frameworks and which will be resisted if there is cause to suspect (rightly or wrongly) that other trusted safety nets will be upset one way or another …This is where religion becomes a culprit.

The voice of religion steps into the gap often where the existing government “compassion” models fail.  Many drift into the social and economic umbrella provided by faith groups who readily see these gaps as opportunities to recruit zealots who eventually imbibe the belief structures of their “helpers” … sometimes unfortunately graduating into misguided instruments of terror. This answers the confusion of many who seek to understand how a people that are not religious go to war (apparently) under a religious banner.  The common denominator that points at the solution to the puzzle are the huge segments of poverty, social disaffection and despair of an oppressed populace mostly disenfranchised and not seeing a system working for them…highly vulnerable to manipulation.

America and Europe will applaud every time an election is free and fair and a western-type democracy is force-fitted on a people…and then wonders why the tensions. But what is needed for sustainable peace is not always another Oxford trained democrat but perhaps new simpler legal and governance models that integrate the poor into the economy, banks for the poor, simple legal structures that allow the poor and traditional citizenry to have basic property rights, access to capital and access to capital which work for simple people with little education. If the governments do not offer these alternative models, then underground structures will do so and this is what feeds the natural demand for Hamas and other ”Brotherhood”  organisations that are more trusted (by their own people) than the formal government bureaucracies. The tensions in nations can be an opportunity for new wealth by adaptations to capture or integrate the extralegal segments of societies now delinked from the mainstream of their economy … perhaps someday making extra-legalism, which sooner or later sometimes will degenerate into terrorism, more of an extraneous irrelevance. (Pls see related articles for more context below)

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