The Impoverished: Held back by a blinkered world too busy to listen.
The Independent newspaper has today renewed a drive it made earlier in the year by publishing The Independent Red Edition. This is not a drive to become The Socialist Worker, an anti-capitalist, revolutionary weekly. Nor is it an attempt to dumb down to the level of British redtops.
It is instead something much more refreshing. The newspaper has joined up with the Global Fund to Fight Aids once again as a means of educating the masses about the plight of poverty and AIDS across Africa. Rather than having little snippets of news spread about various issues, just dotted around where people are likely to miss them, these two editions are instead resolutely focused on important agendas surrounding poverty eradication. The Red theme is a brand (if you will) created in an attempt to raise awareness and money for the Global Fund by teaming up with the world’s most iconic brands to produce Red-branded products.
This is something that pervaded today’s issue of the daily newspaper, and I found it fascinating to see editorials on economic poverty juxtaposed with materialist advertising for products such as the Motorola SLVR, to give but one example. Not just from the social and informative standpoint, but also from a design point of view.
Poverty captivates me by its sheer prevalence and deep complexity. This complexity makes the amelioration of poverty difficult to approach and instigate; all the more so with it being a highly contested field. Many have a strong conception that poverty is merely a deficit of material assets, such as clothes, food and water. While this is certainly true in some of the harsher areas of places such as Sudan in Africa, for example, I feel there is a stronger issue at play: social exclusion.
This field approaches two of the structures I feel are key to ending poverty, and I am not talking about hopelessly throwing money at the problem. No, this looks at the strength of education and empowerment. Many people in the world have the basic things they require already, but are alienated from employment and societal participation. This limits people’s say in controlling their lives and livelihoods as well as often restricting ostracised groups from reforming inequitable socio-political constructions or institutions. This alienation can be caused, as is often the case in poverty, by a multiplicity of factors, such as geographical estrangement from infrastructure, or intrinsic historical racism. Poverty is very much multifaceted.
Regardless of my generalisation here, that seems to hypocritically disregard my contrasting argument that poverty is complex, education IS the way forward.
In today’s paper one statement strongly supported my long held belief in this and demonstrated how it is intrinsically linked to the amelioration of a host of social and economic ills:
In Africa, one in three children does not go to school. Two thirds of the 40 million non-attenders are girls and the illiteracy among women in places such as Mozambique is double that of men.
Yet, as Asia has shown, when girls are educated, they marry later, have fewer children and their incomes rise. Economic productivity grows, infant mortality is halved, deaths in child birth fall, birth rates slow, child malnutrition is halved, general nutrition and health improve and the spread of HIV is reduced. Every extra year of education boosts a girl’s eventual wages by at least 10 per cent.
Education is equally as important in the West as the East. In the West I feel it imperative that people come to understand the difficulties of approaching the issues of poverty as well as deepening their comprehension of the issues at play. The causes and types of impoverishment differ from area to area, even between linked geographical locations. Thus, I highlight again my support for empowerment, especially on a local, community-based scale. Hellen Wanjiku, a twenty-four year old Kenyan woman, has lifted herself from the slums of Nairobi and is now the managing editor of a local community radio station. She says: The youth have empowered themselves. We believe we can survive. It is changing our belief and giving us an option. If a youth can get a job then they will not steal.
I am an idealist and not ashamed of the fact. I like to find the positives in things and hope for the best. Some say this is a stupid thing to do, but I merely feel pessimism to be at times a negative and unhelpful influence. However, I will allow myself a little rant for a moment. Apologies in advance.
Two things have struck me as profoundly unconstructive on successive days. The first was yesterday, a small article in the local paper: Entitled ‘Running for Peace and Harmony’ it followed a team of runners from across the globe who did a short run across Ipswich to promote international friendship and understanding. This, it should be noted, is actually part of an event in seventy different countries. Nevertheless, how exactly does this help engage people in bringing about world peace? Does it strike directly at the heart of the Zimbabwean people to rise up against the escalating armed suppression of free speech across their nation? Does it educate British people about the causes and reasoning behind civil wars and religious Jihad? No, and no.
The second was today, in my much loved Independent. Oxfam has again started promoting free white bands to promote World Poverty Day, 2006. I could rant on for day on how I find such things a wasteful use of donated resources, and how there are better avenues into which to invest money, but I shall not. Instead I merely want to highlight the infuriating futility of the wrist bands. A kid will wear one for perhaps a few months while it is fashionable. He or she will feel good about themselves; it is after all in the name of fighting poverty. A noble cause if there ever was one. However, in the end the band will find itself nestled amongst some pants in a bedside table with the child none the wiser as to what poverty is or how to make it history.
Education is a great and positive step in the right direction. But, as with everything surrounding the eradication of poverty, it must be done in the right ways. What these methods are is far beyond the scope of this entry, but there is a lot to be said for listening and developing a cultural understanding of impoverished peoples as opposed to the mere indoctrination of Western value systems.
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7 Responses to “The Impoverished: Held back by a blinkered world too busy to listen.”
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Can poverty be eradicated? SHOULD poverty be eradicated?
It’s a very difficult topic. The causes for poverty are what we would term as evil, its existence is something I can neither comprehend or relate to. But its eradication? Would this lead to something far more frightening?
I guess we won’t really ever know. All I know is that every sane society has those at the bottom and those at the top. All we need to do is establish what they’re bottom and top IN, and how wide the gap is.
I’m very much swaying to the position that you’re hinting toward - that destitution is a natural, and in fact perhaps, necessary feature of social life that acts as an incentive for people to strive to achieve more in life.
In the fiscal sense, welfarism tends much to support the workshy and all too often cushions people fromthe harsher relaities of the life in front of them. For me, inequalities in society seem more and more to lie in unequal individual performance; the characters and behaviour of the people themselves.
This is not, however, to say we should strive to limit the impact or extensity of poverty.
Aha. Those socialists amoung us would point out that poverty is integral to the capitalist system. with the rise of Asia as a major consumer other areas of the world (actually - other places in Asia and S.America) became their working classes and also the home of mineral wealth from which to exploit.
I personally…. Believe it to an extent. I think we can bring things a lot closer together through welfare systems and state intervention in the markets (but you’ve got to strike a balance on that one).
However, and hear me out here - this is a serious point and one you have laughed at before. There is a statistic. That if all six billion people on earth were to live at the same level as your average US citizen it would take 3,4,5 or 6 (i forget the exact figure) more EARTHS to provide the materials.
which is why, in my utpoian vision, i think policy should be three fold.
a) bring the poor up to a sustainable level of consumption
b) make western standards of living less wasteful and more sustainable
c) On the assumption that mankind will never reach a balance with nature, i.e. we will always extract more than it can sustain - we need to start thinking about where else we can obtain materials…
…
Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
Don’t you dare consider mentioning space. Don’t. No.
I agree with what you’re saying. I hope that:
a) The industrialisation of developing nations will increase competition and force the developed world into more efficient and less fuel intensive processes.
b) Industrialising nations will be able to leapfrog the standard processes of development straight into those new, greener technologies.
This is again quite idealist, as the technologies will likely be sold at a high price, and through Western businesses alone. This disrupts the effective development of local infrastructure possibly as much as if the nation were to jump past the intensive use of oil and coal power, diesel and petrochemicals. That said, I’d happily be proved wrong; that a developing nation can jump straight into green technologies from the get-go.
I think this is possible but it requires … international support for it to happen. The US and EU (or maybe the UN if it had the funding) need to put aside petty politics and offer a massive helping hand to China and India among others and help them pay for greener technologies, it is in the West’s interests that emissions from these nations don’t contribute to the rising of sea levels and destruction of western territories. So it does make perfect sense to help, even if they are afraid of losing their dominant economic position in the process.
And for that to happen then the USA needs to take a leading role. China and India will not see the need to ratify environmental treaties if America refuses to do so - as the Economist pointed out a few weeks ago.
Our hopes lie with America. I pray its leaders become enlightened sooner. rather than later.
But that’s no excuse to just wait around for them to do something - Hell will have frozen over if we wait for that. It’s up to humble souls like you and me to do our bit. yippie.
But for the long term survival of mankind….
we need ourselves a new frontier… for social, as well as material needs.
trust.
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