Trekking through rural Bangladesh, where rolling blackouts would leave villagers with only a few hours of electricity a day, Derek Gent was intent on imparting his Western economic knowledge to locals after graduating business school in 1996.
Nearly two decades later, the current executive director of the Vancity Community Foundation said it’s still hard to shake his “eye-opening” experiences with villagers who were often both illiterate and innumerate.
“(One woman) had this system of nails and different pieces of coloured paper that she was using as an accounting and inventory management system,” he recalled.
“It just blows my mind the level of sophistication she could apply to the business without having all these Western tools.”
via Walk to fight global poverty | Local | News | Vancouver 24 hrs.
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