ENDING GLOBAL POVERTY

A GUIDE TO WHAT WORKS

STEPHEN C. SMITH

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN         2005

PART IV

 

Chapter 2: The Keys to Capability: Eight Keys to Escaping Poverty Traps (Cont.)

The Fifth Key: Access to the benefits of new technologies for higher productivity

Basic literacy and numeracy are of intrinsic value. But to be most effective in helping the poor to take advantage of market opportunities, raise their productivity, and escape from poverty traps, there must also be access to useful knowledge and improved technologies. Access to new technology lets a person with basic literacy become functionally literate in that branch of knowledge – connecting a poor person to some of the technologies that could life her out of poverty.

There have already been great benefits of new technologies for poverty reduction, from contraception and medicines, to high-yielding crop varieties, to telecommunications. In India, computer-assisted learning for the poor coming to school at a somewhat older age has proven highly effective. When electrification has reached rural villages, and been distributed in a way that gives access to the poor, clear benefits have been recorded. A child who works in the fields after school can now do his homework at home after dark. Cellphones in Bangladesh have made an enormous difference. For example, you don’t have to spend the whole day going to the city in order to have a conversation with someone or resolve a problem. This way people can use their time more productively, working on their farms or businesses. But cellphones and access to the Internet do not come automatically. In many cases NGOs concerned with poverty have taken the vital first steps.

Ultimately, the poor need more than just specific job skills – these may become obsolete. They need to learn to learn, to learn how to adapt and make flexible use of new technologies. Teaching new skills in the context of immediate problems faced by the poor reinforces learning and helps participants to move to the next steps needed to escape from poverty. The contexts in which the poor learn new skills become important in themselves. Learning skills as a member of a solidarity group can also help build confidence, offer personal support, and reinforce learning.

The Sixth Key: A non-degraded and stable environment to ensure sustainable development

Lake Victoria beckons from the history books and the map, an apparent oasis, a great lake of Africa. Surely the people who live there, if anywhere, have a beautiful environment and a steady source of food. The reality on the ground is far different.

Watching the Kenyan boys fish along the shores of Lake Victoria, one sees some of the limits to the old catchphrase, “teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” There are many impediments to making this simple solution work. Fishing skills are of limited help in a dying lake. In Kenya the human population is rising and the fish population is falling, due to a combination of overfishing and pollution. Water hyacinths, introduced from Asia, choke out other life and provide a breeding ground for malarial mosquitoes and parasites.

Just as we have seen an escalating pace of new diseases emerging in the world, no doubt there will be an acceleration of environmental shocks, the results of which we cannot anticipate. Some result from the accidental importation of pests, such as the Asia beetle invasion in the United States, a byproduct of increased world trade. Others, like global warming, result from accumulated choices of millions of people decentralized around the globe, especially those of us in the rich countries. Rising sea levels from increased warming threatens to inundate many islands and densely populated coastal regions of developing countries. Eight million people in densely populated Bangladesh live in coastal areas likely to be affected by rising sea levels in the next few decades. Environmental crises are looming as the biggest barrier to progress against poverty. As Walt Kelly put it so well, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Rapid population growth creates a race between needed and available resources. It challenges carrying capacity and can ultimately led to ecological collapse, as indeed looms in parts of the Sahel, where desertification and other forms of environmental degradation threaten to make growth unsustainable and the cost of ecological restoration unattainable.

The poor are both the victims and also unwitting perpetrators of environmental degradation. A common conjecture is that the richest billion and the poorest billion do most environmental damage. The poor have a high rate of fertility. They practice slash and burn agriculture in the tropical rainforests. They over use soil, overforage for fuelwood. The cause is poverty.

With increasing income, the poor are able to improve their environment, through both individual and collective action. With the aid of NGOs, the poor learn how to maintain the environment, and to get help with environmental protection when it is needed. In part because of the damage that we in the rich countries are indirectly doing to the environment of the poor countries, we will have to accept that there will be a need for assistance for poor countries for some time to come.

• Problems of the urban environment receive less attention than rural problems. But slum dwellers can face environmental hazards that can exceed those in rural areas.
• The rich find ways to insulate themselves from the worst of it, although they are by no means immune, but the poor suffer the greatest impact.
• Located just a short walk from the modern high-rise office buildings and hotels of downtown Nairobi, Kibera is Africa’s largest and most infamous slum.
• A UN study found that a majority of the landlords of Kibera were actually government officials and politicians.
• Without empowerment, in many cases the poor can do little to protect their own environments.

 

The Seventh Key: Personal empowerment to gain freedom from exploitation and torment

Personal empowerment may be the most important key to capability, because it can unlock the strongbox where other keys are found. Professor Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank said, “a $20 loan is really just a pretext to give a woman an opportunity to find out who she is, to give her a chance to open up her natural creativity.”

Poverty and powerlessness are two sides of the same coin. When the poor are powerless they remain poor. Those without power find it very difficult to get the power and resources they need to make a better life. All too commonly, local elites work to reinforce this vicious cycle. When elites benefit from others’ poverty or powerlessness, they often actively perpetuate both. They do this with coercive exploitation enforced with terror. When you ask the poor about their lives, they frequently speak of their feelings of impotence and fear. “Today we’re fine, tomorrow they will throw us out,” said the squatter in Ecuador. “If you don’t know anyone, you will be thrown to the corner of a hospital!” said the man in rural India.

The Voices of the Poor study found that “mental health problems – stress, anxiety, depression, lack of self-esteem, and suicide are among the more commonly identified effects of poverty and ill-being by discussion groups,” particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean. This is starkly seen in the woman in Ecuador who said “I want to commit suicide, I want to run out because to see the kids crying and I do not have one sucre to give them some bread. Life is so sad.” The poor and those who live in close proximity to them are well aware of these links. In parts of Africa, people describe a mental condition associated with poverty as “madness.” Mental health has deteriorated significantly in the former Soviet Union and southeast Europe, along with the general decline in health and incomes.

• Depression an anxiety are often considered afflictions of affluent societies, but they are pervasive among the poor in developing countries.
• These mental health problems are a consequence of poverty, but then become also its cause – another poverty trap.
• Mental illness deprives the poor of “capabilities to function.” Poor mental health, in addition, is also often associated with poor physical health.
• In some African countries AIDS is creating a virtual generation of orphans. Over 10 million AIDS orphans lived in Africa in 2000.
• Providing basic needs for these orphans, ensuring that they are not discriminated against out of irrational fears, and seeing that they are able to obtain the few years of schooling that will help rescue them from absolute poverty is a major challenge in the struggle against poverty.
• Political analysts claim conditions are ripe not only for child abuse and exploitation, but for recruiting children for guerrilla armies led by unscrupulous aspiring dictators or mercenary groups.
• The resulting destabilization and diversion of resources can have a devastating social and economic development impact.
• Individual empowerment must take place in a context of participation in much broader, empowered communities. This leads us to the final key.

 

The Eighth Key: Community empowerment to ensure effective participation in the wider world

• Having power is critical to your ability to take control of your life, and to take advantage of opportunities to escape from poverty traps.
• Empowering the poor also frees them to innovate, to envision new possibilities, to become more productive, to find new ways to solve problems, and to form productive, cooperative relationships with others to achieve shared goals.
• To escape from poverty requires empowered people within a community that is empowered to function within the wider world.
• The poor depend on their community’s security to survive, to defend their rights, and to preserve their opportunities to improve the lives of their families.
• Communities must have and maintain peace to be empowered. Civil strife is still one of the greatest impediments to ending global poverty.
• Community empowerment is key to security.
• Your community, or communities, however humble, must be informed, empowered to stand up for their interests, and able to defend their rights.
• The poor need democracy and human rights as much as do the rich.

Empowerment supports the other keys to capability. Without empowerment there may be no access to markets and land. While greater income can do much even in the short run, it cannot guarantee a sustainable escape from poverty traps if the poor are still not in a position to access education and healthcare, if they cannot demand that government provide a functioning road to a wider market, if income can only be gained in a grossly demeaning or dependency producing way, or if the poor live and work in an environment being undermined by outside forces lacking accountability.

The goals and means are often the same in the best poverty alleviation programs. Health, education, environmental sustainability, personal and community empowerment, access to economic opportunity: All these are worthy ends in themselves as well as prerequisites for escaping poverty traps. Effective poverty programs don’t just deliver services – they build capabilities and sustainable assets.

PART II

ESCAPING THE POVERTY TRAP:

HOW THE POOR ARE GAINING THE KEYS TO CAPABILITY

 

Even in the poorest regions of the world, far from the major growth engines of the global economy, and in the face of many handicaps, good work is being done to help the poor gain the keys to capability and escape from poverty traps. Part II of the book takes a close look at innovative and inspiring programs in areas such as the Andes, Sub-Saharan Africa, and rural South Asia that remain outside the mainstream of the world economy.