The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty by Clayton M. Christensen

Section 1
The Power of Market-Creating
Innovations

Chapter 1
An Introduction to the Prosperity Paradox
It’s not an easy thing to be laughed at by serious people. And serious people laughed at me when I
told them I wanted to build a telecommunications network in Africa twenty years ago. They told me
all the reasons the project would never succeed. Somehow I just kept thinking, I know there are
challenges but why can’t they see the opportunity?
—MO IBRAHIM
The Idea in Brief
Starving children on street corners. Slums without adequate clean water and
sanitation. Hopeless prospects for employment amid a growing youth
population. Most of us are moved by the painful signs of poverty we see in
poor countries all around the world. According to the World Bank, more than
750 million people still live in extreme poverty, surviving on less than $1.90 a
day. We all want to help. But what might seem to be the most obvious
solution to these problems—directly assisting poor countries by investing to
fix these visible signs of poverty—has not been as successful as many of us
would like. You only have to look at the billions of dollars that have been
channeled to these problems over the years with relatively slow progress to
conclude that something is not quite right. With these efforts, we may be
temporarily easing poverty for some—but we’re not moving the needle
enough.
What if we considered this problem through a different lens? What if,
instead of trying to fix the visible signs of poverty, we focused on creating
lasting prosperity? This may require a counterintuitive approach, but one that
will cause you to see opportunities where you might least expect them.
* * *
In the late 1990s, when Mo Ibrahim first conceived of setting up a mobile
phone company in Africa, people said he was, well, nuts. “Everybody said
Africa is a basket case,” he recalls now. “It’s a dangerous place, it’s full of

The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty by Clayton M. Christensen