Introduction
This 'Views on Government' section serves to enhance your knowledge of the relationship between national governments and poverty through expert commentary. We asked several experts in the field of poverty alleviation, including Kathleen McHugh (Senior Management Specialist at 'Save the Children') and Peter Bell (former President of CARE USA), questions about the role of developed governments in poverty alleviation efforts. Don't miss reading the full interview transcripts for Kathleen McHugh avd Peter Bell in the More Solutions section either.
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View #1: What do you believe is the role of the governments of developed countries in poverty alleviation?
Kathleen McHugh, Save the Children:
Well, I would say it would probably be on a couple different levels.
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[I]t's our responsibility... to improve the lives of others. Just basic humanitarian stuff there. So I would say one would be to help with programs, to really help make a difference in the lives of other people would be one aspect of the government's role.
I think another one would be to help on the advocacy side, help raise awareness of problems that are out there, to work with other governments to really highlight some of the problems in their own country that they maybe don't acknowledge, and then not only to highlight them but to assist them with planning and to work with [writing] legislation [to address those problems]. ...[S]o doing a lot of raising awareness, and encouraging countries to acknowledge that, and giving an example of how it can be addressed.
And then to help to get countries the financial resources to address some of their problems, but also the intellectual [capital] as well, maybe in encouraging sharing of information, encouraging people to study, or sending experts to go there to transfer skill - not necessarily kind of a parental role that the US would play in saying what you're doing wrong, here's what is right - but helping to develop skills in countries so they can address their own problems.
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Peter Bell, CARE USA:
The U.S. government is in a [very] important position to be of help, because we do have the largest economy in the world.
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We are a great democracy, and we are, after all, the world’s only superpower. We can help by providing developmental systems that will reduce extreme poverty.
We can also help by engaging in debt relief for the poorest countries, particularly when those countries will use the funds that they saved to serve the advancement of their own people. We can help by investing more in research agenda, [such as in] health and medical research, that will respond to the threat of infectious diseases that [devastate] the developing part of the world; right now [that] gets very scant attention from continental resources in this country.
Yet another way we can help is through reducing trade barriers, particularly to agricultural products and commodities from the poorest part of the world.
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Sources
Bell, Peter. Telephone Interview. 19 December 2005.
McHugh, Kathleen. Telephone Interview. 5 January 2006.
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