Portraits of Poverty

WHY DO CHILDREN bunk school? Why do young people leave the village for the city? Why don’t more women stand for local elections? These are just some of the scenarios that Esther Duflo lays out in her most recent book, Poor Economics for Kids with Cheyenne Olivier (Juggernaut; 400 pages; ₹999). The Nobel laureate takes the key themes of her foundational book written with husband and fellow laureate Abhijit Banerjee, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2011) and renders them into memorable parables for children of all ages. Written nearly 15 years ago, Poor Economics, and the work done by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab have provided the touchstones for development economics. In its latest avatar Duflo spins stories around the key themes of Poor Economics to illustrate that the poor are rational decision makers, constrained by circumstances, and to show that small incremen­tal policy changes can alleviate poverty.

In the recent past, other nonfiction writers have also made their work accessible to children. Whether it is Yuval Noah Harari’s Unstoppable Us, Volume 1: How Humans Took over the World (2022) or closer to home P Sainath’s Unknown Heroes of India’s Freedom Struggle (2023). Public intellectual and philosopher Harari has said, “It is actually more difficult to write for kids than for adults. Because it forces you to think harder and not hide behind complicated language.”

I ask Duflo if she also found it harder to write for children than for adults. Unlike Harari, she does not take a side immediately, but says it was a “dif­ferent exercise, a different type of challenge”. She enjoyed the leeway that fiction gave her, and the challenge of capturing many lessons into a single nugget, and more importantly, she found it enjoy­able to “address children who have less prejudices.”

Like Harari, Olivier believes children are often better readers than adults as they are quicker to catch lapses in logic and the storyline. She says, “We are talking to children as equals. We are maybe taking them as more thorough readers than adults. They are very conscious both at the story level and the content level.”

Duflo has long wanted to write for children, and was only waiting to have something to tell them. She started writing children’s stories after she finished Poor Economics, but she didn’t get enough time. Banerjee and she published Good Economics for Hard Times in 2019, they also met Olivier around then, and felt her visual vocabulary would perfectly sync with their tenets. The pandemic offered Duflo a window of time and opportunity, which she hadn’t had before. She says, “It is kind of a pandemic project, some people started baking bread, and we wrote 10 books.”

Originally published by Seuil Jeunesse in French as 10 volumes, the work is also being published by Pratham Books, as slim volumes, with individual stories, across five languages: Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, and Tamil. Duflo’s attempt is clearly not to write a niche book for a handful of young readers and enlightened parents, instead she wishes to reach a far wider audience. And it is here that the illustrations play as significant a role as the text. To read the book is to be transported to the world of Nilou and her friends, a group of children and teens. They live not in a particular geography but in what can be called an Anywhere Village as the setting could be India or Africa, and the characters could be from here, there or anyplace. This fictional world created in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black is complete in itself, not because it replicates the familiar, but because it immerses us in a new and different world. Each chapter is a whole, but characters reappear from one story to another, ensuring continuity.

The lead character Nilou is an orange haired spunky little girl, who dislikes going to school as her teacher is not particular­ly nice. Her teacher’s harshness forces her to skip school, much to the chagrin of her parents, who did not get the same opportu­nities as her. One day a lady from out of town arrives and gives the children a test, in which they all fare poorly. The parents are enraged and the schoolteacher is humiliated. Nilou’s mother comes up with a solution—why not ask the older students to teach the younger ones? With the help of the older students, school suddenly becomes fun, and the students do much better in their maths, reading and writing. This first chapter of Poor Economics for Kids showcases the many aspects of education that Duflo and Banerjee have studied. Students from poor families can’t turn to their parents, or tutors, for help so they end up caught in a cycle of confusion and under confidence. Through Nilou’s story (based on the work of Pratham, where young people in the village tutored students), the reader learns the importance of ‘teaching at the right level’, where curricular and teaching is adjusted to the level of children.

The other nine chapters similarly tell of other themes from Poor Economics, whether it is preventive health mea­sures or evidence-informed policy making. When I speak to Duflo, Olivier is also on the call, highlighting the collabora­tive nature of Poor Economics for Kids, where the author and illustrator played an equally vital role in creating the story. France-based artist Olivier is known for her visual vocabulary made of elementary shapes like squares, circles and triangles, which together create a universe where humans and animals and plants are all made of common material. Through skillful stacking and placing of these geometric shapes—Olivier creates the branch of a tree, the rays of the sun, the anatomy of animals, the posture of humans, with precision and flair. Olivier’s world is like Legoland, where the beauty of the whole lies in the position and symmetry of the parts. Each illustration is eye-catching with the animated expressions of the characters and the details of the landscape. I ask Duflo and Olivier why they chose not to set their book in a particular place or country. Speaking from Paris, Duflo makes clear that the nowhereness of the text is fundamental to it.

She elaborates, “That was very, very, very important for me. My work is also located all around the world. We are all part of culture and history and specific social groups, but there are many, many things that are universal about human experience and universal about the experience of poverty. I wanted to describe that common thread and showing that universality helps. So, to make it very widely accessible and not to talk down to anyone, it was very important that the children in the book are not located in a particular place.”

Wanting to reach as wide a read­ership as possible, both Duflo and Olivier built a world with common issues but no specific identifiers. Olivier’s geometric style of drawing suited this endeavour. For her it was important that the reader engage with the concepts and ideas in the book, and not get distracted by real-world nitty gritty. She says, “Basic shapes allow you to say this is hap­pening in a conceptual world with which you can engage. We want kids to engage with that universe no matter where they come from.” To create a convincing make-believe world, Duflo even made up the names of the characters such as Nilou, Oola, Thumpa and Bibir. Nilou, for example, is inspired by her son’s name Milieu. And Thumpa is a different spelling of the dak naam of an acquaintance.

In a fictional world, representing the government and people who work in it was another challenge. For example, if the book were set in India, a writer could use the word ‘babu’ to denote a government employee. The role of government in policy change is central to Duflo’s work as an economist. She says, “We had a great problem to solve with the government because the government never appears in children’s books.” While in the first iteration of the book, Olivier drew the govern­ment representative as a rotund figure, the author and illustra­tor decided to “move away from Russian standards, and present them like all the characters in the book.” Duflo says, “They are now neither superheroes nor comical figures.”

Each chapter carries a lesson, but it is delivered with the lightest of touches. There is no heavy hand here, delivering a message from a distant pulpit. Befitting a children’s book, the theme is secondary to the story. As Olivier says, “We wanted at some point in the story to forget about the theme, but to highlight just the basic human relation between Nilou and her mom, between Nilou and her friends, between a young kid and an old woman. Which is to say that what comes first is the fact that the kids should relate to the characters as characters, who happen to be poor, but not in essence.”

Duflo’s work has long focused also on the reciprocal and intimate relationship between women’s empowerment and economic development. Gender empowerment, defined as improving women’s ability to access the constituents of develop­ment—health, education, earning opportunities, rights, and political participation—can accelerate development. In Poor Economics for Kids this relationship is poignantly laid out in a story like ‘Oola and the Elections’. Despite her reservations, with her husband’s support, Nilou’s mother Shona decides to stand for elections in the village. Shona, unlike the male candidate, is will­ing to pay heed to the ideas and suggestions of the villagers. She has a vision for the village, and so she wins the mayoral elections.

From a young age, Duflo born to a paediatrician mother and a father who was a professor of mathematics was aware of gender differences. Not because her parents treated her differ­ently, but because of what she saw around her. As she writes in Poor Economics for Kids, “When I was a little girl, I desper­ately wanted to be a boy. I hated dresses, and at the age of five, declared I would never wear one again (in fact, I did not until I was eighteen). I thought boys had the cooler toys. I was not interested in cuddly animals, jumping ropes, or whatever the girls in my class were into.”

As the mother of two children, aged 10 and 12, Duflo now feels she is closer to the childhood of her children than her own. But she acknowledges that her own experiences have moulded this book in more ways than she wishes to admit. Her first experiences of poverty were through reading children’s books. She says, “I always wanted to write a children’s book because some of the discoveries that you make as children stay with you forever. There is such a gaping hole in a good representa­tion of poverty in children’s literature. And it is important that children become aware of poverty when they are still open.”

As a child, Duflo was not stellar, but as “a good, uncomplicat­ed student,” she was well-liked by teachers, and had a great set of friends. She was not a rebel like Nilou, the protagonist of her book, who runs away and dreams of being a truck driver. But Duflo shares with her creation a “discomfort with gender roles” and a questioning and curious nature. She says, “I still don’t accept gender roles that put limits on what girls or women can do, and a lot of my work is about that.” In their book, Duflo and Olivier urge girls and boys to break myths about who can do what, and to accord each other respect.

When Duflo, Banerjee and Michael Kremer were award­ed the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019, the committee hailed them for their “new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty, which involved dividing this issue into smaller, more manageable, questions.” Poor Economics for Kids perfectly illustrates how small policy changes, in education or health, can have a big impact. By showing parents and children, with empathy and compassion, how the poor actually live their lives, Duflo and Olivier are in a small but fundamental way, laying a stepping stone for a more equitable future.

booksCheyenne Olivierchildren bookseconomyEsther DufloNobel Laureatepoverty