This 'Views on Poverty' will help to enhance your knowledge of poverty through expert commentary.
Muhit Rahman (founder of the
Bangladesh Relief Fund), questions about the nature and cause of global poverty.The question was
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. 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.
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