Small, well funded, efforts are much more agile than massive bureaucracies. Additionally, organizations like the UN have to consider broader situations and enforce some degree of fairness. Trying to bring entire nations out of poverty is a generational task that likely won’t succeed. Trying to bring specific communities out of poverty is a multi-year task which has a real chance to work.

Further, picking and choosing which communities fail and which get the multi-year support is a challenge for government bureaucracies. Helping zero communities equally is a better political solution than helping a few.

Smaller groups don’t have to deal nearly so much with the politics or bureaucracies and thus can have more impactful change.