Kiribati, an island country in the central Pacific Ocean, has nearly 130,000 citizens, roughly the population of a small American city. Most people are Christian, including members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The country is also ravaged by severe poverty and food insecurity. Kiribati’s malnutrition rates are comparable to those in North Korea and Chad.
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“If you’re in Kiribati, it’s really hard to practice your faith, have the energy for service in the church, do the things that are meant to by your faith,” said Viva Bartkus, a professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, who studies how to create opportunities in places of conflict and poverty.
Bartkus spoke at Brigham Young University’s London Centre as part of the weeklong “Dare to Overcome: The Economics of Kindness” conference, which began Monday.
“Grinding poverty … makes it very difficult to practice your faith, because you’re worried most of the time that you are not going to have enough for your children.”
Since the 1960s, governments, philanthropic foundations and institutions like the World Bank and IMF have poured $2 trillion to $3 trillion of international development aid with the goal of catalyzing economic growth in 13 of the world’s poorest countries, home to what economist Paul Collier calls the “bottom billion.”
But the decades of development assistance, according to Bartkus, have produced little economic growth in these countries. “We just put $2 to $3 trillion in and essentially got nothing,” she said.
Direct foreign investment too has limitations — it has generated wealth in poor countries, but that wealth has often remained concentrated in cities close to international airports without reaching the most vulnerable populations.
One model, however, appears to be reaching remote populations and helping people lift themselves out of poverty. Bartkus, who is Catholic, described BYU-Pathway Worldwide, the online university of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as “the novel and innovative way” of reducing poverty by being both an education and an “economic engine.”
She said she came to London to champion the education program and went on to make a bold claim: “BYU-Pathway could end up becoming by far the largest gift that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will give to the world.”
Education is not enough
For all the importance of education, its power to change a life is limited if it doesn’t result in employment.
“Education is not the key to opportunity, I hate to say that,” said Elder Matthew Eyring, who has previously worked for BYU-Pathway but is now serving as a General Authority Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “You’ve actually got to give educational opportunities and then economic opportunity to everyone.”
The university now serves 100,000 students in nearly 200 countries and territories. Most are in Africa, and about a quarter live in the United States and Canada. BYU-Pathway is flexible in format — students can access much of their coursework and complete assignments on their phones — and allows them to work while pursuing their degrees.
To help students gain professional experience, BYU-Pathway also funds what the school’s president Brian Ashton called “launch wages” for the first three months of a working trial period, which gives employers an opportunity to evaluate the student’s skills before committing to a longer-term hire.
After completing three years of the program, nearly 75% of students say they get better jobs, Ashton told those gathered at the conference Monday. For instance, one student got a job with QuickBooks, even before completing her degree. That led to a job as a recruiter for a company.
Another student worked for a venture capital firm led by Matt Downs, a co-founder of Pearl 27, a Utah-based marketing and branding company that has tapped into the Pathway graduate pool for hires to train AI models.
Students have also conducted field research and face-to-face interviews for the World Bank.
As the threat of AI taking over jobs rises, the school has adapted its curriculum and assessments to account for developments in AI, Ashton told me after the conference session.
“We want our students using AI,” he said. But as AI automates routine tasks, Ashton believes that employers will value skills that technology cannot easily replace. “What employers are going to want are employees who have leadership skills, judgment, and wisdom,” he said.
Building education on principles of the faith, moral foundation and learning through the Holy Spirit can help foster that judgment that he believes companies are beginning to seek in their hires.
‘Dare to Overcome’ and BYU
The London gathering convened scholars from the Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and Latter-day Saint traditions around one key belief: Respect for one another’s religious beliefs is essential for peace.
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Meanwhile, the G20 Interfaith Forum (IF20) in Salt Lake City this week will tackle some of the same issues with religious leaders and policymakers exploring how faith communities can help address global challenges like hunger, AI and energy security.
It was noted that preparations are already underway for IF20 next year in London, bringing some of the ideas explored at this year’s “Dare to Overcome” to be included in the forum.
Brian Grim, who conceived “Dare to Overcome” and who is Catholic, described religious freedom for all faiths and none as a personal calling. This passion grew out of his experience on Sept. 11, 2001, when he was working at the United Arab Emirates military academy. As the 9/11 attacks unfolded, a Muslim general invited him to join Muslim colleagues in prayer while they discussed security plans.
“So that was my workplace on what was perhaps the most unsettling day of life for the world,” Grim told me. “Muslims were recognizing my faith in the workplace and keeping me safe.”
In 2013, Grim, who then worked at the Pew Research Center, met Cole Durham, a prominent Latter-day Saint legal scholar and the founding director of BYU’s International Center for Law and Religion Studies. Durham encouraged Grim to get involved in the work of making workplaces more faith-friendly. In 2014, Grim held the first “Dare to Overcome” conference in Brazil, which since then traveled to Korea, Japan, India, Washington, D.C., and this year, London.
Grim said Latter-day Saints are unique in their global coordinated effort toward religious freedom. “I think in that way they’re offering a contribution that no other faith does.”
Shared spaces
Speakers shared various efforts to expand religious freedom in education and working with local communities, sometimes under significant threat, to challenge entrenched systems and cultural norms.
For instance, Matt Jones, a co-founder of the Freedom of Religious Belief (FORB) Foundation, shared visiting with a mother in Nigeria, whose 23-year-old son was killed because he was Christian. One Nigerian village, where both Christian and Muslim communities shared a commitment to education, faced violence from Boko Haram, the extremist group that has targeted any expression of Western education.
Still, these efforts are underway across the world championed by nonprofits like the Culham St. Gabriel’s in England, Leimena Institute in Indonesia, Hardwired Global in Iraq, as well as the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at BYU.
Since its founding by Durham in 2000, the center grew to publish over 600 scholarly articles and hosted over 1,300 events. In recent years, the center launched the Religious Freedom Alliance Council to address religious freedom in the United States and the Rising Generation Initiative to engage young people.
Hannah Clayson Smith, associate director of the center, emphasized the importance of international networks the center has built to improve protection of religious groups.
“Government is too eager to regulate religion, and it negatively impacts 80% of the world’s total population,” said Smith in a session on Monday.
In some classrooms, religious instruction may look like singing songs about other faiths or an exercise where students are assigned to explain the faith of another peer to someone else. In India, for instance, advocates use the term “human dignity” to talk about religious freedom to avoid the perception of threatening the country’s dominant religion.
There is a risk that religious literacy efforts can backfire, said Mohammed Ahmed who works at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge. The institute is dedicated to interfaith relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims. “If it’s theologized, for example, it’s not necessarily positive,” he said. Instead, he said religious education should focus less on generalized rules and beliefs and more on people’s lived experiences.
The institute’s Diversity Study that surveyed 10,000 people in the United Kingdom found that the attitudes toward diversity have become more polarized and negative. “The debate is often framed as being — are you pro-diversity or anti-diversity,” he said. “We unfortunately live in a world of binary narratives now.”
The “us vs. them” mentality has also amplified and not just toward the newly arrived immigrants but also toward communities that have established over time in the U.K.
To break this cycle of conflict, Ahmed suggested creating “shared spaces,” which can form around schools, faith and sports.
“Contact may be especially powerful when people meet around a shared interest or purpose,” according to Ahmed, “rather than diversity being the sole reason for the encounter.”
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