Christine Hurt, professor of law, wants to show her students what poor means. Not welfare poor, or housing-project poor, or can’t-afford-cable poor. She means dollar-a-day poor, walk-half-a-mile to-get-water poor; the kind of poor that exists in Malawi, Africa.

According to The World Bank, Malawi has a GDP-per-capita of only $343 and a life expectancy of 53, making Malawi one of the poorest countries in the world.

“What I really want them to see is what it’s really like to live in a subsistence economy,” said Hurt, who is taking 15 students from her microfinance class to the landlocked, southern African nation for 10 days.

Hurt said microfinance is the process of granting very small loans — usually around $130 — to small groups of people in developing countries with the hope that the money will be used to create businesses or improve existing ones.

“There’s a lot of opportunity here for a little bit of money to really change people’s lives,” Hurt said.

For Hurt’s students, microfinance represents an area of law that allows them to truly contribute to the public good. She said that some students become disillusioned when they find little connection between studying corporate law and making the world a better place.

“The ideal of microfinance is to help some of the poorest people in the world,” said Nathaniel Koppel, second-year law student.

A self-described idealist, Koppel said he wanted to do more than experience Malawi as a student. He wanted to help, and like any idealist, he wanted that help to be tangible.

“We got a hold of the idea of being able to make a real difference,” said Koppel, who along with his classmates collected around 1,500 pencils, hundreds of school supplies, soccer balls and shoes.

“For a student to come to school in (America) without pencil and paper, that doesn’t fly. It shouldn’t fly anywhere else.”

For all the promises offered by microfinance, Hurt cautioned that there is still no way to measure if microfinance is a viable solution to the crushing poverty facing countries like Malawi.

No studies have shown conclusively whether microfinance actually alleviates poverty, Hurt said, but that doesn’t mean it’s a busted theory. Like the G.I. Bill of the 1950s, the effects of microfinance may take decades to take hold, she said.

Even worse, Hurt said, is the possibility that microfinance adds to a developing nation’s problems. She said some scholars say microloans create opportunities for predatory lending and that many who accept these loans become trapped in debt they cannot repay.

“The problem with credit is that no access to credit to bad, but over-indebtedness is bad (too),” Hurt said. “It’s hard to create that good balance in a developing country.”

The uncertainty surrounding microfinance is one of the reasons Hurt feels the trip is so important for her students, who will visit groups of successful recipients of microloans as well as a group whose project failed.

The students will also be accompanied by Tim Larson, a geologist from the Illinois Geological Survey, who will introduce the students to the challenges facing Malawi’s water infrastucture.

No matter how effective the economic plan, he said, it is for naught if citizens lack access to water.

“At some point you have to address the issue of water and its availability on a reliable and sustainable level,” Larson said.