Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not being able to go to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time. Poverty is losing a child to illness brought about by unclean water. Poverty is powerlessness, lack of representation and freedom.
Poverty has many faces, changing from place to place and across time, and has been described in many ways. Most often, poverty is a situation people want to escape. So poverty is a call to action -- for the poor and the wealthy alike -- a call to change the world so that many more may have enough to eat, adequate shelter, access to education and health, protection from violence, and a voice in what happens in their communities.
DIMENSIONS OF POVERTY
To know what helps to alleviate poverty, what works and what does not, what changes over time, poverty has to be defined, measured, and studied -- and even lived. As poverty has many dimensions, it has to be looked at through a variety of indicators -- levels of income and consumption, social indicators, and now increasingly indicators of vulnerability to risks and of socio/political access. So far, much more work has been done using consumption or income-based measures of poverty. But some work has been done on non-income dimensions of poverty.
MEASURING POVERTY
The most commonly used way to measure poverty is based on incomes or consumption levels. A person is considered poor if his or her consumption or income level falls below some minimum level necessary to meet basic needs. This minimum level is usually called the "poverty line". What is necessary to satisfy basic needs varies across time and societies. Therefore, poverty lines vary in time and place, and each country uses lines, which are appropriate to its level of development, societal norms and values.
Information on consumption and income is obtained through sample surveys, during which households are asked to answer detailed questions on there spending habits and sources of income. Such surveys are conducted more or less regularly in most countries. These sample survey data collection methods are increasingly being complemented by participatory methods, where people are asked what their basic needs are and what poverty means for them. Interestingly, new research shows a high degree of concordance between poverty lines based on objective and subjective assessments of needs.
When estimating poverty worldwide, the same reference poverty line has to be used, and expressed in a common unit across countries. Therefore, for the purpose of global aggregation and comparison, countries used reference lines set at $1 and $2 per day in 1993 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms (where PPPs measure the relative purchasing power of currencies across countries). It has been estimated that in 1998 1.2 billion people world-wide had consumption levels below $1 a day -- 24 percent of the population of the developing world and 2.8 billion lived on less than $2 a day. These figures are lower than earlier estimates, indicating that some progress has taken place, but they still remain too high in terms of human suffering, and much more remains to be done.
NEW DIRECTIONS IN POVERTY MEASUREMENT
While much progress has been made in measuring and analyzing income poverty, efforts are needed to measure and study the many other dimensions of poverty. Work on non-income dimensions of poverty -- defining indicators where needed, gathering data, assessing trend. The agenda includes assembling comparable and high-quality social indicators for education, health, access to services and infrastructure. It also includes developing new indicators to track other dimensions -- for example risk, vulnerability, social exclusion, access to social capital -- as well as ways to compare a multi-dimensional conception of poverty, when it may not make sense to aggregate the various dimensions into one index.
In addition to expanding the range of indicators of poverty, work is needed to integrate data coming from sample surveys with information obtained through more participatory techniques, which usually offer rich insights into why programs work or do not. Participatory approaches illustrate the nature of risk and vulnerability, how cultural factors and ethnicity interact and affect poverty, how social exclusion sets limits to people’s participation in development, and how barriers to such participation can be removed.
RESPONDING TO POVERTY:
First, developing countries must embark on strategies that help them attain these goals. In the areas of poverty and social development, this implies particular attention by policymakers to:
• Accelerating economic growth. Growth is the most powerful weapon in the fight for higher living standards. Faster growth will require policies that encourage macroeconomic stability, shift resources to more efficient sectors, and integrate with the global economy.
• Improving the distribution of income and wealth. The benefits of growth for the poor may be eroded if the distribution of income worsens. But policies that promote better income distribution are not well understood; learning more about the impact of policies on distribution should be high on the agenda.
• Accelerating social development. Social indicators will benefit from improvements in economic growth and income and wealth distribution, but there is stillroom for policies that target interventions that appear to have a large impact on health and educational outcomes. At the top of the list are female education, safe water and sanitation, and child immunization, as well as safety nets to protect the most vulnerable. Attention is also needed to the social structures and institutions, which affect development. Second, donors and international agencies must support countries that show a determination to take up the challenges of the goals for sustainable development. Third, international agencies must work with developing countries to strengthen country capacity to monitor progress on outcomes. This will involve ensuring that the statistical infrastructure in key countries is adequate to mount periodic surveys and analyze the data, and that there is capacity to conduct participatory studies and hear the voices of the poor.
FROM MEASURING PROGRESS TO ACTION
Changes over time and differences across areas in poverty measures and social indicators reveal whether poverty reduction policies are working or not, both at the country and at the global level. Project-level indicators indicate whether a project has worked or not. Knowledge about what works in reducing poverty has to inform, first and foremost, a country's policies and programs. This is why it is essential that there exist in each country capacity to monitor poverty and analyze the impact of policies and projects.
THE PHASES OF POVERTY REDUCTION - OPPORTUNITIES AND RISKS
Creating effective pro-poor policies and building meaningful participation into the process are the major challenges. The process of drawing up and implementing any policy varies from country to country. It takes place on the background of the specific situation of its society, economy, ecology and culture.
Research brings out five main themes of concern:
(1) Governance and accountability;
(2) Pro-poor policies;
(3) Effective monitoring;
(4) Donor practices;
(5) Lack of priority setting.
PHASES
Assessment:
Understanding poverty, its diversity, its causes, its effects
Strategy design:
Participatory analysis of a range of policy options and identification of the most promising strategies
Approval:
The country's authorities (government, parliament) decide on poverty reduction strategies and its budgetary implications
Implementation:
Those entire involved national–local, public–private, individual–institutional put the plans/ strategies into practice
Monitoring:
The progress is monitored to provide regular feedback
PAKISTAN –CASE STUDY
“A country is poor because it is poor”
If you carry out a survey in Pakistan and ask the people what their No1 problem is, it will not be Kashmir, or a fear of the Taliban of Pakistan. It will be unemployment followed by bad governance and leading to poverty. There is general consensus among the economists that during the last 12 years, the number of people living below poverty line has increased tremendously, in 1988 it was 22 per cent, now it is about 36 per cent.
In the government statistics the rate of unemployment is shown as 5.6 per cent. Is this believable? Even in industrialized countries, 8-10 per cent unemployment is quite common. Whatever the number of unemployed in the country, the government can say that we are spending huge amounts of money on “poverty alleviation”. Programs for helping the poor have been launched under different names by various governments.
When we say that poverty in Pakistan is neither because of natural causes nor is it accidental, its corollary is that it is a political issue. It is the by product of the elitist model of governance and misconceived macro-policies that our ruling oligarchy has followed during the last 54 years. Tragedy is that the authors of these policies were highly trained economists who came from the top universities of the first world.
MAJOR FLAWS IN DEVEOPLEMT STRATEGIES
In Pakistan the major flaws of the development strategy were
a) Industrial development without agriculture development;
b) Large scale industry without the prior development of small-scale industry;
c) Urbanization outpacing industrialization;
d) Services growing faster than the productive base of agriculture and industry;
e) Population growth racing ahead of employment growth.
LESSONS LEARNT FROM PAST EXPERIENCE
Due to poor targeting, most poverty alleviation schemes seldom reached the needy. The middle classes and the influential hijacked them. We can infer these lessons from the past experiences.
• Don’t treat alleviation of poverty as a sector. How can you expect to reduce poverty by launching few programs while other macro policies continue to increase poverty?
• Don’t start grandiose programs and projects to help the poor. They never work. Start small, scale-up and mainstream gradually
• Don’t believe that massive foreign aid can lead to poverty reduction. The IMF and the World Bank are not the solution. As a matter of fact they are the part of problem. Dependence on aid giving agencies has created a new sort of poverties and in many cases has resulted in an erosion of sovereignty and destabilization of societies. Sustainable development is only possible through local resources, which can always be found if the programs are participatory in nature and low in cost.
• Don’t use soft programs/ subsidies to solve social sector problems- they will not be sustainable in the long run.
• Don’t believe that NGOs can replace the government- they can at best quicken the process of social mobilization; can do intermediation between the state and the poor.
• Don’t believe that community participation means that people participate in government programs. It should be other way round. Government should support what the people are doing.
POINTS TO PONDER
While devising poverty alleviation strategy the following points are to be pondered upon:
• It must be admitted that conventional methods to eradicate poverty won’t work. Similarly it must also be accepted that in the social sector, government cannot do everything. It has neither the capacity nor the resources to do so. In Pakistan, the problem is neither shortage of funds nor lack of skilled manpower. The main issue is poor governance and poor management.
• Grass root realities needs to be studied and its result accepted with open mind. It must be admitted that people have been surviving in spite of the state, not because of the state. The initiative of the communities and small enterprises in solving their problems need to be supported and supplemented. They do not expect much from the government. What they need is an enabling environment, and availability of research oriented technical support in solving their problems.
• Smaller things in the following sectors should be left to the poor and their associations. There is empirical evidence that they can undertake these activities on ‘self-help and self-managed basis’ with the support of cooperatives and community based organizations: check dams and water management –agriculture cooperatives- rural water supply-sanitation and solid waste management- agriculture cooperatives-rural water supply- sanitation and solid waste management at lane level- housing- basic health-education at primary level-family planning-social forestry-saving and credit societies. What they need is technical support from the professionals and space for social mobilization. Bigger things like big dams, trunk sewers, treatment plants, water source development, making land available for housing and big hospitals, colleges, universities etc. should be the responsibility of the state. To implement this approach structural partnership based on the concept of component sharing needs to be developed.
• The myths and misconceptions about the poor that 1) they are not organized; 2) they are too poor to pay for the services; 3) they are not bankable (they will not return the money if given to them in small loans); 4) they do not want to change their lives, need to be thrown in the dustbin. There is empirical evidence across the globe to disprove these myths and misconceptions; 5) we must now go beyond the rhetoric of creating awareness, capacity building, advocacy networking and running training courses- the much touted strategy advocated by the NGOs and donor agencies. What people need are low-cost, easy to implement, sustainable packages which can solve their basic problems.
• Technocrats and policy makers should unlearn what they have learnt in the universities, and start a process of relearning. They must realize that text book prescribed in the universities and colleges have no link with ground reality.
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