Reflect. Act. Transform.

For both, Paulo Freire and Amartya Sen, freedom is the essence of well-being. One cannot truly exist without the other. This premise is also acknowledged by the Poverty Stoplight and integrated into its different activities.

Through the process of adaptation, the Poverty Stoplight considers the values and beliefs of the people who use the self-evaluation. Participants are questioned on what it means to live in poverty in their own particular socioeconomic context, thus taking into account their backgrounds and identities to customize a Stoplight survey that reflects their own experiences of poverty and well-being.

Poverty-elimination programs are not to be constructed without the people it intends to help. Top-down approaches are unable to produce a long-lasting effect because they do not work on empowering people or activating their potential. Thus, once these programs finish, their impact starts declining rapidly. For this reason, the Poverty Stoplight not only takes into account the experiences of the people we work with, but also enables people to achieve conscientization.

Conscientization, according to Paulo Freire, is the critical awareness that precedes action. The self-evaluation serves as a means for people to reflect on their living conditions. It enables families to identify their own limitations and obstacles, but also the actions that can be taken to transform that situation. In the context of poverty-elimination, deprivations are not a set of parameters that people get to experience, but rather challenges for new actions that encourage people to achieve better lives. Following this principle, the reflection that the Poverty Stoplight proposes for families is not an uncommitted practice, but an intentional practice that seeks to find strategies to transcend and overcome poverty.

Participants are then encouraged to reflect, act, and transform their lives and the systems around them.

This touches deep on the fact that before acting, people create their own plan of actions and identify what are the most adequate tools to serve them in their purpose. People not only anticipate their work, but also what they wish to accomplish. In the same way, Stoplight indicators are constructed to help people identify what are their current conditions and what steps they can take in order to improve them.

For this reason, the Stoplight surveys are not only used to feed organizations’ databases, but they also stay with the families after they finish their self-evaluation. Information is power, and families can use their own data to grasp different aspects of their lives and plan their next actions.

This is what separates the Poverty Stoplight from most poverty-eliminations programs, since we work on empowering families and giving them the tools to develop critical agency. Once the program is finished, we aim for families to keep questioning and challenging the reasons behind their conditions of poverty and taking conscious actions to transform them.

Families working with the Poverty Stoplight have the capacity to understand the root causes of their deprivations and decide on what are the best strategies to tackle them. This innovative framework also encourages knowledge exchange among people. Individual responses to actual conditions can only transform that much, but collective knowledge and actions can tackle structural problems that are experienced by families living in the same community.

For the Poverty Stoplight, families and communities are valued participants in the poverty-elimination process. They are the true protagonists of successful strategies to tackle this global problem. The role of organizations within the Stoplight framework is to assist families in their own search for better conditions. This bottom-up approach, focused on critical and collective agency, is what makes it possible for people to affect positive changes in their systems.

Friere envisioned schools as critical spaces where students would be empowered to take action. The Poverty Stoplight borrows from this praxis to empower families to tackle multidimensional poverty from the root. By developing the skills to challenge their current situation, identify the root problems and the actions that can improve them, families are prepared to approach not only current problems, but also future ones, ensuring that the impact of the Poverty Stoplight program will outlast its implementation.