Project Concern International (PCI)

Hernando de Soto is a revolutionary economist who is helping impoverished communities worldwide rise out of financial struggle. Recipient of Project Concern International’s 2007 Humanitarian Award, de Soto is the founder of Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) in Lima, Peru. Time magazine included de Soto as one of the five leading Latin American innovators of the century and among the 100 most influential people in the world. In his award acceptance letter, de Soto shared the following:
"[The people who work for me see]…the economic potential in the shantytowns of Lima and every other city we work in, and thus the opportunity to really change the world – where two thirds of the people, four billion of them, are stuck in poverty. They share with me a love of the challenge of helping poor and struggling countries make the transition to modern, market economies – and convincing their Governments (and the US Government in Washington and non-profit organizations like Project Concern International) that the poor are not the problem, but the solution.
Over the past 25 years, what we at the ILD have discovered is that there is a large constituency for change in developing countries. They’re called the "poor," and what we’ve revealed about these people is that they wouldn’t survive at all if they weren’t hardworking, clever entrepreneurs. They have assets in the form of houses, property, and small businesses. But they need something else to prosper – i.e. the same legal tools that rich nations (and country elites) take for granted: property rights, legal ways to organize their businesses productively, and mechanisms to operate in expanded markets outside the confines of family and friends.
No matter what populist and anti-globalization leaders might say, we know that these entrepreneurs are eager to take their place in their national and then international markets, because, even though costly bureaucracies and just plain bad law keeps them from these legal tools, they replicate them in their underground economies: informal property titles, contracts, wills, credit – all in an effort to do business and protect their assets. But these "extralegal" practices are inadequate.
What the ILD does is to identify the bad laws and the good extralegal practices, and then help Governments make the kind of institutional reforms that will engineer an inclusive market economy under a single rule of law. That’s the only way it can be done, and the good news is that it has been done before – in Europe, the
U.S., and Japan, for example, when these were still developing countries full of migrants, squatters, and peasants trying to make a better life for their families."