The plain, data-backed case that this model delivers more for the people it serves, per dollar, than any aid program of the last decade. The idea is simple: keep the money in the community instead of letting it get skimmed off the top, and turn part of it into a share of a business the community owns. This is the answer to anyone who questions the method.
A dollar of regular aid to Haiti reached Haitian hands at about one to twelve cents, and it was gone the moment it was spent. A dollar in this model stays with the community at about eighty cents. Forty of those cents pay wages. Forty build an ownership stake the community keeps... a share of the business itself. Twenty are reinvested to start the next site. After we launch, the work pays for itself and we never have to ask the donor again.
This is the math on paper. It is true by design. Where we rely on an estimate rather than a hard number, we say so.
This is not a hunch. The amount that gets skimmed off the top before money reaches ordinary people is a number, and we measured it.
We studied 34 real cases of economic extraction across four continents and 260 years. The answer barely moves: about 86 cents of every dollar stays at the top. Ordinary people are left with about 14. We wrote that prediction down publicly, before we scored the test cases, so we could not move the goalposts afterward. This model is built to flip the number on its head. In our communities, the goal is for the community to keep about 80 cents.
It does not matter what the method is, where it happens, or what century. Steady extraction keeps about 85 percent. Even disasters, where a lot of value is simply destroyed rather than stolen, leave the top with about 45. And the banks and financiers alone take about 40 cents of every dollar. This model takes that same 40 cents the banks usually get, and turns it into a stake in the business the community owns.
Most aid leaks the dollar before it reaches the community. This model keeps about eighty cents, and turns part of it into something the community owns.
| Program | Reaches the community | What happens to it | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Haiti aid after the 2010 quake | ~1% to the govt; 0.4% to Haitian groups; 6% in food/goods | spent once, gone | Center for Global Development, 2012 |
| Typical US aid (USAID) | ~12% straight to local groups | spent once | USAID; US GAO 2021 |
| Best cash-handout programs | ~88% to the person, and it ripples 2.5× locally | spent in 1–2 years | Egger et al., 2022 |
| This model | ~80% stays in the community | 40% becomes ownership they build | this site's model |
Every dollar the businesses earn is split the same way, every time. That predictability is the whole point.
Forty cents build an ownership stake in the business, a share the young person holds and can't be stripped of. Forty cents are paid as wages. Twenty cents start the next site. The wage starts small, about a dollar an hour, near thirty dollars a month, and it climbs as a worker trains up and the farm earns more. Say it plain... on day-one cash, a gang can pay more. What a gang never gives is the part that lasts: a share of a business that keeps paying, and keeps growing, long after the gang's cash is spent. That is the pay that wins, and it wins over time.
Regular aid is a bill that arrives every year. This is a one-time investment that pays for itself after launch.
To keep the same work going for ten years, regular aid costs about ten dollars, one every year, because the grant always runs out. This model costs about one dollar once. The businesses fund years two through ten themselves. That is ten times more efficient on time alone, before you even count how much more reaches people. And over those same years, the share that stays with the community climbs from about 15 percent to about 80.
This is the part no other program has. Forty cents of every dollar becomes an ownership stake, a share of the business the young people themselves hold.
It's a real, growing stake in something that earns. As the TapTaps produce and sell, the share the youth hold grows with them. A wage gets spent. A share keeps paying. So they don't just earn... they own a piece of the thing they built, and it's theirs to keep.
Three separate advantages, each with a number behind it. Nothing hidden.
| Advantage | This model | Regular Haiti aid | How much better |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. How much reaches the community | ~80¢ | ~1 to 12¢ | 7 to 80× |
| 2. Builds something the community owns | 40¢ ownership stake that grows | nothing owned | new entirely |
| 3. Cost to keep it going 10 years | ~$1, once | ~$10, every year | ~10× |
Being straight about it. This is the math on paper, not yet a finished study. It assumes the businesses hit the break-even point we have modeled. We do not claim to beat the best cash-handout programs on how much reaches people; we win over the years on ownership and on paying for itself. The one number we still have to prove on the ground is how much a single site actually earns. The pilot is built to measure exactly that.