This 'Views on Poverty' section serves to enhance your knowledge of poverty through expert commentary. We asked several experts in the field of poverty alleviation, including Kathleen McHugh (Senior Management Specialist at 'Save the Children'), Peter Bell (former President of CARE USA), and Muhit Rahman (founder of the Bangladesh Relief Fund), questions about the nature and cause of global poverty. Don't miss reading the full interview transcripts for Kathleen McHugh, Peter Bell, and Muhit Rahman in the More Solutions section either.

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Kathleen McHugh, Save the Children:
I would say that poverty should be defined by an individual's inability to affect change in their lives, maybe resulting from a lack of key resources. Read More... [T]hose key resources would be basic health, education, potable water and adequate food. And then I would say that certainly someone could descend into poverty form an external shock, maybe a tsunami, or an earthquake which could wipe out your assets. Others, of course, are born into poverty. And we see much [of this] in the [places like the] Horn of Africa. Definitely [an] inability to exert change in your life. Collapse...

Peter Bell, CARE USA:
Right, well you know, it used to be that poverty was regarded primarily in economic terms. Read More... It was seen as having low income, and in fact even today, we often talk about the one point two billion people of the world who live somehow on a dollar or less a day, and talk about their being in extreme poverty.

But within CARE, and I think among many of our sister organizations, we have come increasingly to think of poverty in terms of disempowerment, or in terms of deprivation of basic human rights. And by contrast, development of poverty reduction is related to empowerment, to men, women, and children; to gaining greater effective control over important decisions in their own lives. So yes, economics is an important component of empowerment and income generation is critical, but not by any means sufficient. It is also important [to have] education, the exercise of effective citizenship [to] be able to help hold [the] government and other authorities accountable, and a series of other dimensions that round out a person having a sense of full citizenship and some measure of control over their own lives. Collapse...

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Muhit Rahman, Bangladesh Relief Fund:
I think it’s a very complex question and there are many different things that keep poor people poor, and they are all interrelated, and they rise and fall in significance. Read More... In parts of the world, there is war. Clearly it’s impossible to try to do anything useful, to help others, when people are fighting and killing each other.

In other parts of the world - sub-Saharan Africa comes to mind - diseases such as AIDS have decimated entire generations of people. AIDS has created a whole new generation of problems that are going to last for who knows how many decades. This epidemic will be hard to recover from. I don’t know if the developed world could have done something more active to prevent the spread of AIDS. It certainly could have done more, but how much more effective it would have been, I don’t know.

Then, too, there are natural disasters that sometimes happen with devastating effects. The tsunami was one. In Bangladesh, there are cyclones that happen on the scale that happened here in New Orleans. If that, or the floods, happened in places like Bangladesh, the disaster just sets everybody back down to zero. If someone had accumulated a certain degree of comfort, a hurricane or cyclone can wipe that out, and the person is back down to nothing, and now everybody in the family has to work, and they can’t escape poverty. What keeps people impoverished is the lack of a social infrastructure, a social safety net. Look at what happened when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Everybody jumped in and hundreds of billions of dollars are going to be allocated to people and eventually help them recover. Nothing like that exists in Bangladesh. The earthquake that just happened in Kashmir affected three million people, but in terms of the total number of dollars per person spent on the recovery--nothing, practically nothing. These people, these three million people are set down to a zero level. Some of them may have land that they can cultivate again in a few more years, but right now they’re down to zero. And for decades or generations to come, there will be this enormous group of people who will remain impoverished, unless the world, unless we as a whole take a really active look at how to lift them out of poverty and help them become productive global citizens.

Other factors, longer term factors, also play a role in to keeping poor people poor. Democracy, or more aptly, the lack of it, is one. When you don’t have a good government system, a lawful system, it promotes inequality. The poor people are not empowered. They’re easy to trample, they’re easy to rob, they’re easy to exploit. And that’s what happens. In Bangladesh, I know for a fact that when some disaster happens, and the government sends relief, maybe a ton of food grain to a particular area for distribution to the poor people, but the first thing that happens is that half of it gets stolen by those who are in charge of distributing it, and the other half gets distributed to people who are in their political party, people who are favored by them. It’s not very efficient.

The same thing happens with foreign aid from developed countries. When we were traveling to Bangladesh this summer, we ran into the chief of an NGO coming back from Germany. He said a German agency wanted to give $5 million to his NGO for relief projects, but 90% had to be used to hire German nationals as consultants. And the sad part is that these German nationals don’t even speak English, so they will be useless in Bangladesh. Basically it’s a boondoggle. They (the Germans) are going to go and make a lot of money. And they get hazard pay because it’s a tough life. What’s in it for the NGO? They get to use ten percent, and they believe they can do a lot of good with half a million dollars, which is why they trek out to Berlin to beg for the money. Same basic thing happens with funds from the USAID or UNDP. Their programs bring over heavy equipment--you go from place to place in Bangladesh and you will see all these hulks, the skeletons of large excavating equipment, rusting there because some aid program paid for them, somebody granted billions of dollars, which was then used to buy full-priced foreign equipment. The government that gave the equipment doesn’t really care. The sellers of the equipment, they just have their sale. Whether or not that equipment gets used properly or efficiently, nobody cares. There’s a huge amount of inefficiency in all of this.

But having said all of that, the total amount of money we devote to poverty is a pittance. We spend more money on bottled water. We spend ten times more money on bottled water annually in the developed countries, where you don’t really need bottled water. If we spent a tenth of that money in providing clean water for the rest of the world, the problem of unclean water would be largely solved. It’s our ridiculous assignment of priorities to various resources in the developed world. The poor can only help themselves within limits. They don’t have the resources to build a foundation. We have to step in and build the foundations, and teach them how to maintain the structure. So democracy, education, and more money spent providing education to help those in the developing world - it’s going to take a lot, maybe even years or generations before this investment bears fruit, but it surely will. Collapse...

Kathleen McHugh, Save the Children:
I think [lack of] education is probably the greatest just because lack of education is going to limit your choices or your ability to improve your life. Read More... So I think once you can educate a child then you are going to be able to educate a woman who will be able to educate a family, because she is going to push for her children to always be educated. And then they are going to make better choices about the food that they eat or the water that they drink whether they live or how to mitigate their risks, so I would say that focusing on education is going to have ripple effects, it will probably mitigate cases of HIV/AIDS or , or hepatitis, or causes of wars. For health. It is going to open up a lot of economic opportunities as well. So I think that definitely education is key area to focus on, and education will grow. Collapse...

Peter Bell, CARE USA:
You know, I’m not sure I can point to any single element. The causes of poverty are interconnected. Read More... Some are more immediate, some are more intermediate, and some are more underlying causes. Some of the immediate causes, for example, are malnutrition and disease, but if one goes a little deeper, there are underlying causes such as discrimination and exclusion, though discrimination is probably more [directed] against women and girls. And I think that equal opportunities for women and girls ought not only to be a human right, but that increasing the opportunity for women and girls is probably the best single investment that we make in development of poor communities. And education is especially powerful in the development of girls. Each year of education will improve their own health and the health of their children, and return to family and income.

Violent conflict is also a powerful cause of poverty in counties like Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and finding just and lasting resolutions to conflict are an important way in contributing to the ending of poverty. One other underlying cause, I would mention, is abusive power, for government. And once again, a government that advises by the rule of law and treats their citizens with respect provide services to the poor and are likely to foster development. Of course, an important part of that is to create an environment where human rights are observed and in which there is opportunity for opportunity.

Just returning, one moment to the importance of education, another very critical need for development in the community level is access to safe and clean water. Education and water are two immediate vital needs for the well being of people and the development of communities.

Another cause of poverty of the world is the apathy of many governments and organizations of people, who could help to reduce poverty, but are so absorbed in their own lives, that they fail to do so. Collapse...

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Bell, Peter. Telephone Interview. 19 December 2005.

McHugh, Kathleen. Telephone Interview. 5 January 2006.

Rahman, Muhit. Personal Interview. 2005.

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Copyright © 2006 ThinkQuest Team 00282