Combined steps necessary to eradicate poverty

Md. Arafat Rahman :

Poverty eradication is a set of measures, both economic and humanitarian, that are intended to permanently lift people out of poverty.

The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty was celebrated yesterday (October 17) throughout the world.

The first commemoration of the event took place in Paris, France, in 1987 when people gathered on the Human Rights and Liberties Plaza to honor victims of poverty, hunger, violence and fear.

In 1992 the United Nations officially designated October 17 as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

The Day promotes dialogue and understanding between people living in poverty and their communities, and society at large.

It represents an opportunity to acknowledge the efforts and struggles of people living in poverty, a chance for them to make their concerns heard and a moment to recognise that poor people are in the forefront in the fight against poverty.

An international committee was launched in 2008 to promote the day in its founding spirit.

The composition of the committee is unique with members including people with lived experience of extreme poverty and human rights defenders engaged in the fight against poverty.

Every year, the international committee engages in a consultation process through the Forum on Overcoming Poverty to select a theme for the annual observance of October 17 by the UN with input from people with lived experience of poverty.

One of the primary goals of the Day is to recognize the struggles of the impoverished and to make their voices heard by governments and citizens. Participation by the poorest of people is an important aspect of the observance of the Day.

Poverty occurs in both developing countries and developed countries.

While poverty is much more widespread in developing countries, both types of countries undertake poverty reduction measures.

Poverty has been historically accepted in some parts of the world as inevitable as non-industrialized economies produced very little, while populations grew almost as fast, making wealth scarce.

Poverty reduction occurs largely as a result of overall economic growth.

Food shortages were common before modern agricultural technology and in places that lack them today, such as nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation methods.

The dawn of the Industrial Revolution led to high economic growth, eliminating mass poverty in what is now considered the developed world.

World GDP per person quintupled during the 20th century.

Today, continued economic development is constrained by the lack of economic freedoms.

Economic liberalization requires extending property rights to the poor, especially to land.

Financial services, notably savings, can be made accessible to the poor through technology, such as mobile banking.

Inefficient institutions, corruption, and political instability can also discourage investment.

Aid and government support in health, education, and infrastructure helps growth by increasing human and physical capital.

Poverty alleviation also involves improving the living conditions of people who are already poor.

Aid, particularly in the medical and scientific areas, is essential in providing better lives, such as the Green Revolution and the eradication of smallpox.

Problems with today’s development aid include the high proportion of tied aid, which mandates receiving nations to buy products, often more expensive, originating only from donor countries.

Nevertheless, some believe that small changes in the ways people in affluent nations live their lives could solve world poverty.

Due to economic liberalization, poverty in the world is rising rather than declining and the data provided by the World Bank, echoing that poverty is decreasing, is flawed.

They also argue that extending property rights protection to the poor is one of the most important poverty reduction strategies a nation can implement.

Securing property rights to land, the largest asset for most societies, is vital to their economic freedom.

The World Bank concludes that increasing land rights is the key to reducing poverty citing that land rights greatly increase poor people’s wealth, in some cases doubling it.

It is estimated that state recognition of the property of the poor would give them assets worth 40 times all the foreign aid since 1945.

Although approaches varied, the World Bank said the key issues were security of tenure and ensuring land transactions were low cost.

In China and India, noted reductions in poverty in recent decades have occurred mostly as a result of the abandonment of collective farming in China and the cutting of government red tape in India.

However, ending government sponsorship of social programmes is sometimes advocated as a free market principle with tragic consequences.

For example, the World Bank presses poor nations to eliminate subsidies for fertilizer that many farmers cannot afford at market prices.

The reconfiguration of public financing in former Soviet states during their transition to a market economy called for reduced spending on health and education, sharply increasing poverty.

Trade liberalization increases total surplus of trading nations.

Remittances sent to poor countries are sometimes larger than foreign direct investment and total remittances are more than double aid flows from OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries.

Economic growth has the indirect potential to alleviate poverty, as a result of simultaneous increases in employment opportunities and labour productivity.

Most of the chronically poor are wage earners in formal employment owing to the fact that their jobs are insecure and low paid and offer no chance to accumulate wealth to avoid risks.

This appears to be the result of a negative relationship between employment creation and increased productivity, when a simultaneous positive increase is required to reduce poverty.

Increases in employment without increases in productivity leads to a rise in the number of working poor.

The empowerment of women has recently become a significant area of discussion with respect to development and economics; however it is often regarded as a topic that only addresses and primarily deals with gender inequality.

Because women and men experience poverty differently, they hold dissimilar poverty reduction priorities and are affected differently by development interventions and poverty reduction strategies.

In response to the socialized phenomenon known as the feminization of poverty, policies aimed to reduce poverty have begun to address poor women separately from poor men.

In addition to engendering poverty and poverty interventions, a correlation between greater gender equality and greater poverty reduction and economic growth has been illustrated by research through the World Bank, suggesting that promoting gender equality through empowerment of women is a qualitatively significant poverty reduction strategy.

Addressing gender equality and empowering women are necessary steps in overcoming poverty and furthering development as supported by the human development and capabilities approach and the Millennium Development Goals.

Disparities in the areas of education, mortality rates, health and other social and economic indicators impose large costs on well-being and health of the poor, which diminishes productivity and the potential to reduce poverty.

The limited opportunities of women in most societies restrict their aptitude to improve economic conditions and access services to enhance their well-being.

(The writer is an official at Southeast University, Dhaka.)