INTERNATIONAL DONORS AND VILLAGES LIKE SAURI

The international donor community should be thinking round the clock about one question: how can the Big Five interventions be scaled up in rural areas like Sauri? With a population of some 33 million people, of whom two thirds are in rural areas, Kenya would require annual investments on the order of $1.5 billion per year for its Sauris, with donors filling most of that financing gap, since the national government is already stretched beyond its means. (More precise estimates of cost would have to be worked out in the context of detailed development plans as described in chapter 14.) Instead, donor support to Kenya is around $100 million, or a mere one fifteenth of what is needed. Kenya’s debt servicing to the rich world is around $600 million per year, so its budget is still being drained by the international community, not bolstered by it.

US and Israeli targets on Kenyan soil have been hit in recent years, sending Kenya’s tourist industry into a downward spiral and causing hundreds of deaths of Kenyans and massive property damage.
When the Kenyan government recently proposed a national social health insurance fund, the very thing needed to scale up access to basic health care, donors quickly objected rather than jumped at the opportunity to examine how it could actually be accomplished.
The issue of corruption overshadows donor relations with the Kenyan government. Most donor governments have corruption inside their own governments and even in the provision of foreign aid (which is often linked to powerful political interests within donor countries).
Donors should sit down with government leadership and say, “We’d like to help you scale up the Big Five in Kenya’s villages to enable you to ensure that all of Kenya’s rural poor have access to agricultural inputs, health, education, electricity, communications and transport, and safe water and sanitation.
With a little more forethought, donors and governments could take advantage of the crucial fact that villages like Sauri have a group monitoring and enforcement mechanism automatically built into village life that can help to ensure that aid to the village is well used.
If donor officials would join the government of Kenya in meeting with the villagers and brainstorming with government officials, they could come up with dozens of fruitful approaches to ensure that aid actually reaches the villages.

MEETING WITH THE URBAN POOR: MUMBAI, INDIA

Several thousand miles from Sauri, Kenya, an impoverished community in Mumbai, India, struggles with the urban face of extreme poverty. A group that I met in June 2004 comes from a community that lives near the railway tracks. By near, I do not mean within range of the railway whistle as the train rolls through the city; I mean a community that lives within ten feet of the tracks. It may seem impossible, but the shacks of poster board, corrugated sheet metal, thatch, and whatever else is at hand are pushed tight against the tracks, as seen in photograph 6. Children and the old routinely walk along the tracks, often within a foot or two of passing trains. They defecate on the tracks, for lack of alternative sanitation. And they are routinely maimed and killed by the trains.

The overarching theme of our discussion is not latrines, running water, and safety from the trains, but empowerment: specifically, the group is discussing how slum dwellers who own virtually nothing have found a voice, a strategy for negotiating with the city government.
There is a Railway Slum Dwellers Federation (RSDF), which has been organized by the community members, with the aid of SPARC (the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres, founded by an energetic and charismatic social worker, Sheela Patel), to negotiate with the municipality and the Indian Railways concerning their needs and interests.
Each woman begins with a kind of testimonial to the power of group action. They cannot read and write, but they know full well that their children need and deserve better.
Group action has taught them that they have legal rights and the possibility of access to public services if they act together.
As in the villages of Sauri, what this community needs are investments in individuals and basic infrastructure that can empower people to be healthier, better educated, and more productive in the workforce.
With SPARC’s initiative, the new Slum Rehabilitation Act has given added power to the communities: slum-dweller organizations are now legally empowered to act as land developers if they can demonstrate that they have agreements to represent at least 70% of the eligible slum dwellers in a particular location.
As land developers, the slum-dweller organizations can tap into special municipal programs to gain access to real estate for community resettlement or for commercial development that can finance resettlement elsewhere.
Recently the World Bank has creatively joined the mix, helping to finance some of the upgrading of Mumbai’s urban transport based on a major role for the NGOs in the design and implementation of the resettlement programs.
The NGOs, for their part, have made important advances in organizing and documenting the community members to facilitate the process.
Sheela Patel and her colleagues have said that these programs are “steps on the journey towards citizenship for the urban poor, where rights are translated into reality because of the favorable confluence of a supportive policy environment and grassroots democracy in action.”

THE PROBLEM OF SCALE

The end of poverty must start in the villages of Sauri and the slums of Mumbai, and millions of places like them. The key to ending poverty is to create a global network of connections that reach from impoverished communities to the very centers of world power and wealth and back again. Looking at conditions in Sauri, we can see how far $70 per person can go in changing lives – not as a welfare handout, but as an investment in sustained economic growth. Looking at the conditions in Mumbai, we can see how a stable and safe physical environment for a community can enable its households to get a foothold in the urban economy, one that is already linked to global markets.

The starting points of that chain are the poor themselves. They are ready to act, both individually and collectively. They are already hard working, prepared to struggle to stay afloat and to get ahead. They have a very realistic idea about their conditions and how to improve them, not a mystical acceptance of their fate. They are also ready to govern themselves responsibly, ensuring that any help that they receive is used for the benefits of the group rather than pocketed by powerful individuals. But they are too poor to solve their problems on their own. So, too, are their own governments. The rich world, which could readily provide the missing finances, wonders how to ensure that money made available would actually reach the poor and be an investment in ending poverty rather than an endless provision of emergency rations. This question can be answered by showing how networks of mutual accountability can run alongside the networks of financing.

In short, we need a strategy for scaling up the investments that will end poverty, including a system of governance that empowers the poor while holding them accountable. In each low-income country, it is time to design a poverty reduction strategy that can meet this challenge.

Chapter 13: Making the Investments Needed to End Poverty

The End of Poverty Part 10

INTERNATIONAL DONORS AND VILLAGES LIKE SAURI

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply