Probably the title of this blog does not excite most. However, in a vocational and missional way, it does excite me.

One of the things that I have wrestled with for years is finding better ways to measure impact in international development. It is important and right to track service metrics… a surgery given, a meal delivered, numbers of people served by installing a new well… but in a line of work when you always need more resources, you want to invest wisely into the activities that do the most good. More is not always better. Sometimes even if you have less, if you invest it well you can obtain much greater results.

My wife recently introduced me to the work of Sabina Alkire – who directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at the University of Oxford. She recently did an interview on YouTube and it gripped my imagination. There are not many YouTube videos that I have gone back and watched multiple times, but this one I have and it has caused me to look at her work over the years. The question I have been examining is the connection between some of these different ways of looking at poverty and the most isolated people in the world.

Where this journey of exploration will take me, I don’t know… but if you are curious, watch Sabina’s interview to see what you think.