The Mission of the Humanity Campaign

Below is the original mission of The Humanity Campaign as published in Appendix 4 of the book Zero to One Million (McGraw-Hill, January 2008) by Ryan P. Allis:

The Humanity Campaign was founded in November 2005. It is based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We wish to increase standards of living, reduce poverty, and encourage sustainable economic development, especially in the developing countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin/South America. Our mission today is:

"To reduce poverty and hunger by increasing access to education, healthcare, technology, and entrepreneurial opportunity in North Carolina, the United States, and the developing world."

Our strategy for accomplishing this goal is to make entrepreneurship and business development possible for every person in every country, fight corrupt government and business, work with governmental and non-governmental organizations to enhance the business and social infrastructure, establish proper legal and property ownership systems, promote free trade and remove tariffs and subsidies, improve entrepreneurship and business education at the grassroots level in every country, and connect entrepreneurs, investors, and governments at every level so as to encourage the exchange of contacts, ideas, methods, and investment capital.

We believe that competitive market economies, free from collusion and corruption, are essential to creating an incentive to produce and thus are essential to a high standard of living. We believe that the ability to be an entrepreneur should be made available to every human from every country. To this end, we will promote not pure capitalism, but rather efficient competitive market economies that take into account those at both ends of the socioeconomic ladder.

We believe in promoting the principles of liberalism. We believe in a republic and democratic system of government, religious freedom, and the promotion of individual initiative. We believe there is a distinct and important role, though limited, for government, especially in the early stages of a country’s development.

We want to give the over two billion persons who live on under $1 per day the chance and ability to make something of themselves, create a life free of poverty, and provide value to society. Presently, breaking out of poverty, becoming an entrepreneur, or significantly improving one’s status is not possible for the majority of persons in the world. In the way is corruption in government and deficiencies in business and social infrastructure, proper legal frameworks, entrepreneurship education for those at the lower socioeconomic ends of society, and communication among aspiring entrepreneurs.

To reach this goal we will follow the below tactics. We will

1. Encourage and teach entrepreneurship at every level;
2. Fight political and business corruption;
3. Help build the business and social infrastructure;
4. Lobby for free trade in goods;
5. Help establish proper legal and property ownership systems; and
6. Connect entrepreneurs at all levels with investors and governments.

First, we will encourage entrepreneurship at every level. The skills of always improving processes, focusing on efficiency, and properly managing people will be important to all members of society. While not everyone will want to be an entrepreneur, we believe that it is a right of mankind to be able to start a business, create value, and if a business succeeds profit from working hard and intelligently.

We must democratize entrepreneurship and streamline governmental systems so as to create a society in which it is not just those with money and connections who are able to start a business. We believe that entrepreneurship creates competition in the marketplace, creates an efficient use of resources and distribution of goods and services for society’s needs, and over time ensures that the price of goods and services goes down while the quality goes up—thus increasing standards of living.

We must teach entrepreneurship in the villages, towns, and cities, and in the schools and homes. Often this will not be the type of entrepreneurship you’ll learn in an American business school. There will often be no venture capital, no down rounds, no initial public offerings, no option pools, and no seasoned executives to attract. Rather, we’ll just as often be teaching how to register a business in a country, the difference between a balance sheet and an income statement, or the difference between revenue and profit. We hope to be at all levels, from working with governments and NGO’s such as the World Trade Organization and World Bank to arranging methods of international distribution and trade for local artisans and farmers to helping write the curriculum at a new graduate business school in Nairobi to assisting with the creation of the first formal stock market in a country.

Crucial to our ability to reach our objectives will be the extent to which we are able to reduce political and business corruption in our world. While the majority of this has been routed out in developed countries over the past century, much still remains in developing nations. We must promote democratic elections, checks and balances in government, and the development of organizations that play roles similar to the Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States. We must fight despotism, nepotism, favoritism, fraud, tax evasion, and financial manipulation.

The third part of our strategy is to assist in the development of the business and social infrastructure. There are very few entrepreneurial support organizations, effective Chambers of Commerce, or universities completing top-tier research in developing countries. We must work to encourage the growth and assist in creating the structure for such organizations.

We must help to launch research labs, entrepreneurship clubs, and tech transfer offices at universities, encourage an active Chamber of Commerce in every sizable town, and bring entrepreneurial networking organizations such as the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), World Entrepreneurs’ Organization (WEO), Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE), Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization (CEO), and The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) to the developing world. Finally, we will work to establish efficient tax systems and with part of this revenue, along with revenue from international aid create a social safety net that gives a hand out for a limited time and forever a hand up.

One of the major problems in our world today is that countries continue to have tariffs on foreign goods and subsidies for their domestic producers, hurting the people of other countries as well as their own countries. Through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and now the World Trade Organization (WTO), much progress has been made on this front since World War II.

One of the most egregious free trade violations today, however, is being made not by the developing countries, but rather by the industrialized countries, namely those in the European Union as well as the United States. This is the problem of farming subsidies. The rich nations of the world pay over $320 billion each year as subsidies to their farmers while they pay just $50 billion in aid to developing countries. These subsidies create artificially high prices and keep producers in developing countries out of the marketplace, essentially relegating the farmers of the developing world to poverty and enriching the large agribusiness companies of the developed nations, while consumers everywhere suffer from higher prices. While a case can be made that some of these subsidies are necessary to maintain enough domestic food production for national security, many must go. The WTO talks in Cancun in September 2003 were the first step toward removing them. The Humanity Campaign will join this fight.

As Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto notes in The Other Path and The Mystery of Capital, a significant problem in the developing world is the lack of formal property laws. Without official title to their land, even if it is only a ten foot by ten foot slum, the poor have little incentive to improve their house and surroundings and just as important are unable to leverage this asset to obtain a microloan from the bank that they could use to start a small business or turn their wood panel or hardened mud walls into concrete or brick. We must establish formal property laws throughout developing nations and we must do this immediately. Further, we must establish legal systems that do not unduly benefit any party or caste, are fair to all members of a country, and take atrocities such as corruption and torture very seriously.

It will take many decades to build The Humanity Campaign into the foundation we hope it will become. There are many people who have dedicated their lives to increasing standards of living, solving the global problem of poverty, and encouraging economic development in the third world. We are with you and we hope you will be with us. For more information on our mission and organization, you can visit http://www.humanitycampaign.org. If you may be interested in helping us achieve our goals, I encourage you to contact us.