Want to Alleviate Poverty? Feed the Mind
by Ann Babe
Sabeen Mahmud was the force behind The Second Floor (T2F), a cultural center for Karachi, Pakistan’s intellectually curious and creative. The innovation at the heart of T2F was conceptual: Mahmud was interested in “intellectual poverty alleviation,” the notion that would become her life’s work, as she described in 2013 for Innovations journal.
Intellectual poverty is the lack of knowledge — as well as the lack of resources, stimulus or freedom to gain it. By the mid-2000s, Mahmud, a Karachi native, could hardly see a trace of the city’s intellectual wealth of the 1960s. “I had grown up hearing stories about Pakistan’s teahouses where poets and revolutionaries would gather …,” Mahmud wrote. “What would it take to create a space that espoused liberal, secular values through its programming and projects?”
In developing countries like Pakistan, one might think that economic poverty, as it’s conventionally understood, would be a more urgent challenge. After all, the Pakistani government’s newly established poverty line estimates nearly a third of Pakistan’s population is poor. But Mahmud believed that intellectual poverty was just as serious a problem — if not at the very root of all other problems.
For Mahmud, Pakistan would never be able to grow its economic and social wealth if it did not first have the intellectual wealth to power it. Intellectual poverty alleviation has the potential to directly facilitate economic poverty alleviation, by sparking the creative and political processes needed to generate and implement effective solutions.
Mahmud knew that for people to hatch big ideas, solve problems and innovate together, they needed a place — an incubator — in which to do it.
“How could we become agents of social change if our theater practitioners had no rehearsal spaces,“ she wrote, “if our underground musicians had no venues to perform in, if our emerging artists had nowhere to hang their work? How could creative dissidents even learn of each other’s existence, let alone build and cultivate a community, without physical spaces where people could talk politics?”
So Mahmud’s big idea was to create that space for them, doing her best to make it the most intellectually stimulating possible.
Without the right environment, it’s hard to make the leap from intellectual irrelevance to relevance. As Pakistani researcher Talha Jalal wrote in a 2010 Express Tribune post, Pakistan was historically a center of Sufi intellectualism and once had a vibrant intelligentsia that made many contributions to the greater world that it today feels out of touch with.
“We must understand that our problems are intellectual and not social, cultural or sociological,” Jalal wrote. “We hang in an intellectual limbo. Our civilization is intellectually misplaced in time. It is like a Roman gladiator fighting in the age of nuclear weapons, and that too with his sword and shield.”
The Second Floor, founded in 2007, has worked to alleviate Karachi’s intellectual poverty through art exhibitions, programming workshops, book readings, pop-up bazaars, film screenings, live performances, academic debates, stand-up comedy, concerts and more. There is Open Mic Night for musicians and comedians; LitLab, a literary open mic, for writers; Philosophy 101 for philosophy neophytes; they even held a Civic Hackathon, which let developers, designers and data analysts come together to create apps that could solve some of Karachi’s most intractable problems.
T2F’s purpose is at its core to grow a community of change-makers who feel supported in their projects and passions, so that they can share them with others and build social movements. By nurturing progressive thinking, creative expression and collaborative dialogue, Mahmud believed, T2F could help shake the apathy and hopelessness out of the Karachi public so it could orchestrate the change the city so badly needed.
Christopher Zambakari, one of the few scholars who has written on the topic, cites intellectual poverty as an underlying source of political instability and poor governance. “A common denominator of these problems,” he argued in a 2014 article, is “poverty in knowledge production.” Just as Jalal calls intellectual poverty the Muslim world’s “most basic and potent threat to [Muslim] society,” Zambakari, too, believes that intellectual poverty “poses a greater danger to the future…than any other problem.”
Creative community spaces, like Sabeen Mahmud’s T2F, are one element of an overall infrastructure that can alleviate intellectual poverty. According to Zambakari, fueling a true intellectual renaissance requires that a larger social, economic, and political framework that supports knowledge-based production. This includes high-quality academic institutions, investment in research and development investments, better educational resources and more policies that are aimed at creating cutting-edge thinkers.
In other words, to fight both economic and intellectual poverty, perhaps more countries need to focus on intellectual innovators as a national asset.
Read Sabeen Mahmud’s full case narrative, published in the MIT Press Innovations journal: “Creative Karachi: Establishing an Arts & Culture Center for the World’s Most Rapidly Growing City”.
Ann Babe is a Korea-born, American Midwest-raised and New York-based independent journalist who covers community culture and identity, social problems and solutions, emerging technologies and international development. Her writing has appeared at the BBC, the Village Voice, VICE, Forbes, the World Economic Forum, Language magazine and beyond. She is a 2016 Southern Africa Fellow with the International Reporting Project, for which she reported from Lesotho and South Africa and has work forthcoming at Next City.
