Bill Gates wants to give the poor chickens. What they need is cash.
“What about teaching people other kinds of skills, beyond animal husbandry? It turns out that training is really expensive too. Even when these programs help poor people build a business, the initiatives almost never pass a simple cost-benefit test. To see why, let’s say a program helps someone earn $2 a day instead of $1. That would be a huge success — an effect more than four times as large as the one identified in the livestock studies, adding up to $1,000 after three years.”