Poverty consumes bandwidth for progress

For decades, we have talked about poverty largely as a shortage of money, measuring it through income, consumption, access to services and ownership of assets. Governments respond with programmes, projects, subsidies and promises. But perhaps we have been looking at poverty from the wrong end of the telescope.

The work of Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir and his colleagues offers a useful way to reframe poverty. Their research on scarcity suggests that poverty not only deprives people of financial resources but also consumes something less visible: cognitive bandwidth.

Constant worries about food, water, school fees, medical bills, insecurity, debt and tomorrow’s income consume the mental capacity needed for survival. This does not mean poor people are less intelligent or capable; they can be remarkably resourceful. But when nearly all their energy goes into solving today’s problems, little space remains for tomorrow.

For a pastoralist family in northern Kenya, daily concerns about water, livestock disease, insecurity, food and markets can make a five-year business plan unrealistic. The problem is not lack of ambition but bandwidth consumed by survival. This should change how we think about development: resilience matters, but it is uncomfortable to keep asking people to become better at surviving conditions we have failed to change. Our objective should be to remove structural constraints that consume people’s bandwidth, restore their agency and enable communities to determine their future.

Protect human dignity

This perspective also brings faith into development. Islam does not regard poverty simply as individual failure. It places obligations on society to protect human dignity, uphold justice and care for the vulnerable. Zakat is not merely charity but a mechanism for redistributing wealth, enabling people constrained by poverty to live with dignity and participate productively.

The Qur’anic emphasis on justice (adl), dignity (karamah) and social responsibility provides a moral foundation for development. The goal should not be dependency, but removing barriers that prevent people from exercising their God-given capabilities. This is where faith and behavioural science meet. If scarcity consumes bandwidth, good development should release it. Reliable water reduces daily uncertainty; good roads lower the cost of reaching markets; security allows children to attend school and businesses to operate; electricity creates room for enterprise; and education expands choices.

Infrastructure, therefore, is not simply about concrete, steel and roads. It is about freeing human capacity.

But there is another bandwidth problem we rarely discuss: leadership.

I was once amused by an observation attributed to Prof John Lonyangapuo, the former Governor of West Pokot, about what the Pokot call Mulmuluwas, beetles.

The beetle pushes a ball of dung forward with determination, only to abandon it and start pushing another. It is a funny image, but it also sounds familiar.

Our leaders campaign with grand promises of roads, water, jobs, industrialisation, agricultural transformation, healthcare and education. Then they are elected. Ideas are forgotten, projects abandoned, priorities shift and, five years later, the same leaders return with another collection of promises.

Changing policies

Like the Mulmuluwas, we push the dung forward, abandon it and start pushing another ball. The joke hides a serious problem. Leadership failure consumes society’s bandwidth. Constantly changing policies make planning difficult; abandoned projects erode confidence; stalled implementation deters investment; and decisions made without communities waste scarce resources.

Uncertainty is itself a form of scarcity.

Good leadership should create predictability, reduce uncertainty and give citizens space to think about tomorrow. That requires a development model that starts with demand rather than supply. Instead of asking, “What project shall government give this community?” we should ask, “What is preventing this community from fulfilling its potential?”

The answer may be water, insecurity, roads, markets, education, healthcare, land rights or finance. Government and development institutions must identify and remove these constraints, while leaders must turn good ideas into institutions, policies and investments that survive beyond the electoral cycle.

Poor communities do not necessarily lack ideas, resilience, faith or ambition. Often, they simply lack the space to think beyond survival. The measure of development should not only be how many projects we build, but whether people have more bandwidth to imagine, plan and build their future. That is the difference between managing poverty and overcoming it.

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Mohamed Guleid is the Chairman of NorthLink Foundation.

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