How can we free children from poverty, for good?
Hundreds of millions of people across the globe live in poverty, and they are often missing access to basic human rights like education, healthcare, and security. For children, these issues are compounded because their entire futures will be built on weak foundations, through no fault of their own. What would it cost the rest of us to reverse the complex systems that creates poverty? The Meta-Problem Method can help us think it through.
Complex problems are often vague and have many possible solutions. The Meta-Problem Method may lead you far away from the dilemma that started your quest. That’s because the method forces you to clarify what you really want and what you are willing to give up. It enables you to compare objectively the possible pathways and their trade offs. It prevents you locking into solutions mode too early and then doubling down on solving a low-yield problem that does not serve your goals as well as the alternatives. At the end of this process, you will have a better understanding of your priorities and how to achieve them.
Steps in the Meta-Problem Method
Dilemma
The high-level issue you are trying to address
Reduce the number of children living in poverty.
Goal
The changes you want to make to address the dilemma. There are usually many options.
Supporting Goals
- No child is malnourished.
- More children are educated.
Other goals could include better access to healthcare, support for children fleeing conflict, and maximizing the number of children who eventually escape poverty.
Problem Space
The set of problems you could chose to solve to advance your goals, plus the constraints that hold you back.
Example problems
- How can we ensure no child is malnourished? Maybe the problem to solve is “How could we get sufficient nutrition to every child?”
- How can we educate more children? Maybe the problem to solve is “What systems need to be developed to provide education to more children?”
There are many other potential problems to solve related to supporting children experiencing poverty. Each goal has many possible problems we could link to it. Are there other problems linked to these first two goals? Which options come to mind for the other goals?
High-Yield Problems
Sometimes solving one problem helps make progress towards several goals. In this step, we identify these “two-for-the-price-of-one” problems.
Which options will advance more than one goal?
- Providing nutritious food to families in crisis leads to better health for life, supports those children escaping conflict, and can also help adults when outside forces prevent easy access to food. However, it would not address the need for education which can help children escape poverty as an adult.
- Giving children scholarships to go to school will increase their education, reduces poverty for their entire lives, which can ultimately end the cycle of malnutrition, increase access to healthcare, and give them more tools to deal with conflict. However, the effects of increased education take time, and more education will not fix malnutrition for children today.
There are many potential solutions that will have varying effects on the set of goals. Which alternatives improve the most important goals? How might the unknown change the right path forward? What other possible solutions are there to address the dilemma?
Problem Selection
Which of the many possible options in the high-yield problem step is the best set to address the dilemma?
- Which solutions make the most sense to reduce poverty?
- Which solutions will best address the dilemma?
- Which solutions will deliver the best outcome for the least amount of time, effort and money?
Implement, Learn and Adapt
Check continuously that you are still solving the best problem, as new information emerges.
Observe and learn as you go. As new information reveals itself, check continuously that you’re still solving the right problem.