ENDING GLOBAL POVERTY

A GUIDE TO WHAT WORKS

STEPHEN C. SMITH

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN         2005

PART I

Front cover

Over 800 million people suffer from chronic hunger, and over 10 million children die each year from preventable causes. These may seem like overwhelming statistics, but as Stephen Smith shows in this call to arms, global poverty is something that we can and should solve within our lifetimes. Ending Global Poverty explores the various traps that keep people mired in poverty – traps like poor nutrition, illiteracy, and lack of access to health care – and presents eight keys to escaping these traps. Smith gives readers the tools they need to determine which approaches are most effective in fighting, and eventually overcoming, poverty. For example, celebrities in commercials who encourage viewers to “adopt” a poor child really seem to care, but will sending money to their organizations do the most good? Smith explains how to make an informed decision. Grassroots programs and organizations are helping people gain the capabilities they need to escape from poverty, and this book highlights many of the most promising of these strategies in some of the poorest countries in the world, explaining what they do and what makes them effective.

Ending Global Poverty shows that although the task is daunting, it isn’t necessary to be rich or powerful to help pull people out of extreme poverty. This book is a vital resource for anyone who wants practical advice about how to make a difference now.

Preface and Acknowledgments

Poverty is a cruel trap. For many of the unfortunate people who are ensnared in this painful leg hold, escape on their own can be all but impossible. A billion human beings today are bound in poverty traps, in almost unrelenting misery.

Although it may look bleak, there is real hope. In fact, hundreds of millions of people have already broken free from poverty, gaining the assets and capabilities to sustainably support themselves and their families in decent living conditions. There have been real breakthroughs in understanding the causes of poverty traps and in designing and implementing grassroots programs that reliably provide the means of escape. Many of the best plans for breaking out of poverty traps have been devised on the ground by people from the developing world, but with much-needed assistance from outside.

This book shows how the world’s poorest people, even those not fortunate enough to live in high-growth economies such as China, can escape the grind of extreme poverty. This can be accomplished in our time, through increasingly effective strategies, in a drama in which we can all play a supporting role while the poor take center stage. The book shows how we can provide the essential help for those doing the best work, as voters, donors, and active citizens.

• Extreme poverty is such a difficult problem because the poor are often stuck in poverty traps, but the special difficulties posed by these traps are all too often overlooked. So I decided to make these traps a focal point of this book.
• I also decided to primarily address problems of poverty in regions where economic growth was not rapid, and where the near-term prospects for rapid growth were not high.
• If poverty can be overcome under these conditions it can be overcome anywhere.
• I identified 8 keys that were particularly important:
• There are on the order of 1 million programs around the world attempting to reduce poverty. I had to develop a method of selecting some of the most effective, innovative, and promising programs from among this large pool.
• I used 3 main screens: highly rigorous evidence of program impact; the winning of major juried prizes and citations for development effectiveness and innovation; and citations of program evaluators of highly regarded private voluntary organizations.
• I hope to offer a way to think about problems of poverty that creates opportunities for all of us to play a role in their solution.

 

Introduction

Global poverty is the scourge and disgrace of our affluent era. But we can effectively end extreme poverty as we know it in our times. The starting point is the awareness of these basic facts: The dimensions of extreme poverty are enormous, but an equal amount of progress has already been made. And although an end to global poverty is not inevitable, with redoubled commitment, we can end extreme poverty in one generation. We have only to follow through and adequately fund strategies that are already working, while continuously and carefully evaluating both new and old strategies and learning from their lessons.

• According to the World Bank, about 1.25 billion people subsist on less that $1 per day, and some 2.8 billion – nearly half the world’s population – live on less than $2 per day.
• The average real income gap between the richest billion and the poorest 2½ billion has widened to more than 16 to 1.
• The real income of the average American is more than 50 times that of the average person in Sub-Saharan Africa.
• About 20 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are poorer today than they were a generation ago.
• By 2001, some 48% of the population was absolutely poor, living on less than $1 per day – the highest incidence of poverty in the world.
• Poverty is hunger. 17% of the world’s population is undernourished or suffering from chronic hunger.
• Chronic hunger is measured by a daily intake of less than about 1,700 calories and a lack of access to safe and nutritious food.
• Poverty is pervasive poor health and early death. Every day, about 30,000 children in developing countries die from preventable causes – almost 11 million this year alone.
• Most of these children die from dehydration from diarrhea; diseases for which there are inexpensive immunizations; and infections, such as pneumonia,   treatable with antibiotics.
• The under-five mortality rate is 126 per 1,000 live births in low-income countries, 39 in middle-income countries and 6 in high income countries.
• A woman dies in childbirth every minute; almost none of these women would have died if they had lived in North America or Europe.
• The incidence of drug-resistant malaria and TB are dramatically worsening.
• At least 180 million child laborers are either under 14 years of age or work in conditions that endangers their health or well-being.
• More than 100 million children have been unable to go to school due to their poverty.
• Poverty is powerlessness. It is the access to real markets that could offer a way out of poverty. It is the systematic exploitation, theft, and abuse not only by the rich but by government officials ostensibly there to help.
• Contrary to popular impression, progress against poverty in the past few decades has been nothing short of extraordinary.
• The percentage of the world’s people living on less than one dollar per day has fallen significantly – from 29% in 1990 to 23% in 1999.
• While the world’s population has continued to grow – more than 42% between 1980 and 2004 – the number of those living in poverty has not significantly worsened; this is in itself an achievement given the large population increase.
• The number of people with access to safe water is increasing steadily.
• The biggest success is China, where 58 million fewer people experienced chronic hunger in the late 1990s, largely due to spectacular growth of the economy.
• The biggest disaster was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in which the number of the hungry increased from 12 million to 38 million in the late 1990s.
• 2,807 food calories per capita were produced worldwide in 2001, in principle far more than needed for everyone to be well-nourished but there are more overweight people than people suffering from calorie-deprivation.
• The good news is that the world can produce more than enough food needed by its people.
• The problem is how to give the poor enough command over resources to meet their nutrition and other basic needs on a regular basis.

There is a growing sense among the American people that we have a moral imperative to end global poverty. To cite just one of many polls, a bipartisan poll commissioned by the Christian lobbying group Bread for the World, released in July 2002, reported that 92.7% of likely voters now say that “fighting the hunger problem” is important to them; and 48.5% said it was “very important,” meaning it would affect their voting.

There has also been growing public interest in such topics as cutting the external debt owed by low-income countries, improving conditions of workers in sweatshops, reform of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), and halting the worsening environmental degradation in developing countries.

• The increased concern about poverty in the developing world is part of a broader renewed public interest in volunteering and social service, in “giving something back.”

This book has three main parts. The first explains poverty – what it means, what it is like in the words of the poor, and why it is a trap that a person or family often cannot escape by their own efforts alone. I then describe the eight “keys to capability” for escaping poverty traps. The second part of the book lays out strategies and programs (generally run by non-governmental/nonprofit organizations but sometimes sponsored by governments or companies) helping to build capabilities and assets among those in extreme poverty and leading to real improvements in the lives of the poor. The third and final part of the book offers a guide to the concrete steps we can each take, as individuals and groups, to help end global poverty. It shows how to be part of the solution, and how not to inadvertently contribute to the problem.

PART I

EXTREME POVERTY: THE CRUELEST TRAP

Chapter 1: Understanding Extreme Poverty: Poverty Traps and the Experience of the Poor