ENDING GLOBAL POVERTY

A GUIDE TO WHAT WORKS

STEPHEN C. SMITH

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN         2005

PART VII

Chapter 4: Basic Education

In rural areas, and among the poorest families, even with the abolition of primary school tuition, many children do little more than enrol in school, if even that. Though school may become nominally free, in many communities in South Asia and elsewhere teachers or officials must be bribed. Expensive uniforms must be bought. School schedules may interfere with children’s work on farms, shepherding, fishing, or other activities. Once children are healthy enough to learn in school, how can schools better reach the poor and serve their needs?

A Good Beginning: Pratham’s Accelerated and Computer-assisted primary learning in India

Pathways out of poverty: Progress in Southern Mexico

Spreading the word: BRAC’S nonformal primary education solution

Giving Children a Chance: Save The Children’s nonformal primary schools in Uganda

 

Chapter 5: Credit for Poverty Reduction, and Insuring Opportunity

Chapter 6: Bottom-Up Market Development: Assets and Access for the Poor

Chapter 7: Entitlement to New Technologies and the Capability to Benefit from Them

Chapter 8: Sustaining the Environment for Ending Poverty

Chapter 9: Social Inclusion and Human Rights for the Poor and Voiceless

Chapter 10: Community Empowerment and Development

Chapter 11: Ten Strategies for Innovation in Ending Global Poverty

 

PART III: WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP

Chapter 12: First Steps

Chapter 13: Further Questions

Chapter 14: Stepping Up

Chapter 15: What Businesses Can Do

 

CONCLUSION

Chapter Some Closing Words: The End to Global Poverty

This book has shown why poverty is a trap, explained what the poor need to escape poverty traps, and described some of the most innovative and effective strategies now being used in the world’s poorest regions to help people escape from the bondage of extreme poverty. The struggle to end global poverty is an epic drama in which we all play a supporting role.

We live in a special moment of history. There are real reasons for optimism. Economic growth is fairly high, technological progress and the spread of new technologies around the world is rapid, market efficiencies are improving, democracy and freedoms are reaching an ever-larger number of people, and measurable progress has been made toward ending global poverty. In one very possible future, we could virtually end extreme poverty in the next quarter century.

But a different and far worse future is also possible. We could still lose the struggle to end global poverty. This is a time of dramatic change, and social and economic patterns have not become set. In the developing world, instead of gaining new rights and freedoms, the poor could find themselves subjected to wider abuses and denial of basic rights. Hundreds of millions of people could sink further into hunger and disease, with large regions of the world trapped in poverty indefinitely. Elite in the developing world, aided negligently by global business, could view globalization as an opportunity to exploit the poor more effectively. Stifled by debt, the poorest countries could enter into a new period of stagnation. Worst of all, as the natural environment continues to deteriorate, all of the benefits of improved knowledge and productivity could be exhausted just in the effort to compensate. Frustrated by growing gaps between images of the distant developed world and the close-by realities of impoverishment, peoples could be driven to the false promises of demagogues, whose policies could enslave and impoverish them.

• In developed countries, a growing focus on the war on terrorism to the exclusion of other social objectives, and a frustration with the slow pace of progress, could lead to a loss of resolve.
• If the priority for aid is to end extreme poverty, then we need to focus attention on what the poor need, what capabilities and assets they lack, and what local and global forces are holding them back.

While we still grapple with how to accelerate growth in countries such as Kenya, Zambia, Bolivia, and Pakistan, we have learned a great deal about how to improve the lives of poor people even when growth is low. We can do this by helping the poor to capability that they need to escape from poverty traps. In so doing, we improve the breadth of the human resources of the country and thus indirectly help to strengthen and improve the markets and institutions needed for successful development. Once the keys to capability have spread as widely as possible throughout a country, the people themselves, through their own institutions and reform efforts, will then be better positioned to determine the most effective development strategies for their own context.

• Successful cases of development usually involve a unique, local response to local constraints that outsiders are not in a good position to understand.
• Despite progress in understanding some of the key sources of growth and the role of institutions in improving market efficiency, remarkably little is known about how to design and implement policies to ensure that growth in the developing world effectively lifts the poor out of poverty.
• In the world of policymaking as much as in the world at large, the voices of the rich can be heard loud and clear while those of the poor barely register.
• The internet changes many things. It makes information cheaper and easier to find. It enables groups to organize. In the fight against poverty it enables donors to identify programs that fit their values and ideas bout what can work.
• We must emphasize more than ever the need to get the greatest poverty reduction impact per aid dollar spent, and this means that objective, rigorous, and independent evaluation should be a condition of funding.
• Donors need to greatly scale-up funding for programs of proven effectiveness, and not overemphasize funding “innovative” programs simply for the sake of appearing innovative.
• Donors should consider greater emphasis on decentralized discovery of effective poverty strategies and the diffusion of these ideas.

Every era has its compelling moral issues. For Ralph Waldo Emerson it was slavery. He would have preferred to contemplate, and to discuss philosophy with his friends. but in the end, Emerson felt he had to risk everything to take a very public stand against slavery at a time when it was perceived as an extreme and inflammatory position. Today’s compelling issue is poverty. In an age of such overflowing abundance, there is no justification for those of us who have been so blessed to stand by while others suffer the most terrible deprivations. In one way, to take a stand on poverty is easy: it is hard to find anyone who admits to being “for” poverty. But it takes risks to stand against farm subsidies and textile protection, and to call for more spending on aid, and more restrictions to preserve the global environment so that the poor in the developing countries do not suffer further. To effectively end poverty will require some sacrifices, even though the ultimate benefits will be great for us all. The struggle to end poverty should also transcend all political calculations. Republican and democrat; Conservative, Liberal, and Labor – all should find ways to put aside their other differences and unite for this urgent cause.

There are other compelling issues. One of the most important is preservation of the environment, and I understand that some put it in the first position. But there is more synergy than tradeoff. Sometimes, to solve environmental problems you have to solve poverty, poverty that is leading the poor to carve unsustainable farms in rainforests, burn unclean fuels, cut environmentally needed trees for cooking fires, and overuse the soil to have more food that particular year when they so desperately need it. And poverty is worsened by climate change that expands deserts, causes more severe weather and more frequent flooding, worsens erosion, and now threatens to submerge heavily populated coastal areas.

• Terrorism is another pressing problem. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank that assists the poor in Bangladesh, said “One of the major causes of terrorism is poverty.”
• Uneducated people who sense that they have no other future are more willing recruits as foot soldiers for terrorist leaders who make false promises.
• The existence of gross disparities in wealth, and such unnecessary suffering, is not the only source of alienation among young people in the developing world, but it is one important source.
• Within as well as across countries, extremes in relative inequality will have to be addressed, for gross inequality in itself, whether deprivations such as hunger and illiteracy are found or not, can also have adverse effects on society, the economy, and individual well-being, ultimately leading to its own forms of absolute deprivation.
• To end global poverty will require everyone’s help. The next step is yours.