Dr. Martin Burt
Founder, Poverty Stoplight & Fundación Paraguaya | PARAGUAY
Short Bio: Dr. Martin Burt is a world-renowned social entrepreneur and microfinance pioneer who has developed two social innovations: the financially self-sufficient agricultural school model and the Poverty Stoplight, a new poverty metric and coaching methodology that is currently being implemented by more than 665,000 families and 1000 organizations in 60 countries. He is the Founder and CEO of Fundación Paraguaya, a social enterprise named Latin America’s most impactful and innovative development organization by the Inter-American Development Bank. In public service, Dr. Martin Burt has served as Chief of Staff to the President of Paraguay, was elected Mayor of the capital city of Paraguay, Asunción, and was appointed Vice Minister of Commerce. Dr. Burt has written books on economics, development, municipal government, poetry, and education. He holds a PhD from Tulane University.
Event: SDGs Conference 2025
Date: September 24, 2025
SPEECH: I have been working in poverty for more than 40 years, concentrating on street vendors with the microfinance movement. There must be a time when we got really frustrated because we did not understand how some street vendors came out of poverty, and some did not. Why did some people who increased their family income not fix their teeth or their bathroom? Why the promise of trickle-down economics by investing in the bottom of the pyramid sometimes worked and sometimes did not.
So, we looked at what the World Bank said about $3 per person per day, which did not match reality at all. Then we analyzed the Sustainable Development Goals. We asked the poor people with whom we work: “What does it mean for you to be not poor?”. They were ready to list us the requirements of having an income, clothes, nutritious food, drinking water, having adults and children to sleep in different bedrooms, education etc. And then they added: you must have a motivation, self-esteem, and be able to control your emotions. What is more important? Drinking water or controlling your emotions. The response was controlling emotions. There are no such subjective indicators among the SDGs, but we kept asking what is more important? Self-esteem or housing? The response was self-esteem. How do you measure poverty with subjective indicators?
We did a visual survey using three colors: green to represent non poverty, yellow to represent poverty, and red to represent ultra poverty. Any family in the world can self-diagnose their level of multidimensional poverty and come up not with an index that aggregates information for decision makers at the top, but a dashboard that disaggregates information for decision makers at the family household level. All these indicators that we were told, in addition to being objective and subjective, are actionable and achievable in five years.
We have now moved from having national development plans, municipal development plans to having family development plans for the world. At the family level, poverty can be eliminated in the short term. This is why we think that we must reconsider everything we are doing with the SDGs because they are third industrial revolution. With this current crisis, we are in the fourth industrial revolution, and now we have AI bots and avatars to coach every single family in their own language, in their own priorities. We are very encouraged with our work on the poverty stoplight. We are working in 14 States in the United States, in 100 communities in the UK. in addition to aroma communities in Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, in the favelas of Brazil, in the township of South Africa. At the family household level, change is possible. So, let’s hope that the fourth industrial revolution allows this.