Poverty is one of the leading problems most countries face. It causes many problematic occasions for its people and their struggle for survival. Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access 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 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.
Did you learn that the United States is rich because we have bountiful natural resources? That has to be nonsense. Africa and South America are probably the richest continents in natural resources but are home to the world’s most miserably
poor people. On the other hand, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and England are poor in natural resources, but their people are among the world’s richest.Maybe your college professor taught that the legacy of colonialism explains Third
World poverty. That’s nonsense as well. Canada was a colony. So were Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. In fact, the richest country in the world, the United States, was once a colony. By contrast, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet,
Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan were never colonies, but they are home to the world’s poorest people.There’s no complete explanation for why some countries are affluent while others are poor, but there are some leads. Rank countries along
a continuum according to whether they are closer to being free-market economies or whether they’re closer to socialist or planned economies. Then, rank countries by per-capita income. We will find a general, not perfect, pattern
whereby those countries having a larger free-market sector produce a higher standard of living for their citizens than those at the socialist end of the continuum.
What is more important is that if we ranked countries according to how Freedom House or Amnesty International rates their human-rights guarantees, we’d see that citizens of countries with market economies are not only richer, but they
tend to enjoy a greater measure of human-rights protections. While there is no complete explanation for the correlation between free markets, higher wealth and human-rights protections, you can bet the rent money that the correlation
is not simply coincidental.With but few exceptions, African countries are not free, and most are basket cases. My colleague, John Blundell, director of the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, highlights some of this in
his article “Africa’s Plight Will Not End With Aid” in The Scotsman (6/14/04). Once a food-exporting country, Zimbabwe stands on the brink of starvation. Just recently, President Robert Mugabe declared that
he’s going to nationalize all the farmland. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the consequence will be to exacerbate Zimbabwe’s food problems. Sierra Leone, rich in minerals, especially diamonds, with highly
fertile land and home to the best port site in West Africa, has declined into a condition of utter despair. It’s a similar story in nearly all of south-of-Sahara Africa. Its people are generally worse off now than they
were
during colonialism both in terms of standard of living and human-rights protections. John Blundell says that the institutions Westerners take for granted are entirely absent in most of Africa. Africans are not incompetent; they’re
just like us. Without the rule of law, private property rights, an independent judiciary, limited government and an infrastructure for basic transportation, water, electricity and communication, we’d also be a diseased, broken and
starving people.What can the West do to help? The worst thing is more foreign aid. For the most part, foreign aid is government to government, and as such, it provides the financial resources that allow Africa’s corrupt regimes to
buy military equipment, pay off cronies and continue to oppress their people. It also provides resources for the leaders to set up “retirement” accounts in Swiss banks. Even so-called humanitarian aid in the form of food is often diverted.
Blundell reports that Mugabe’s thugs rip labels off of wheat and corn shipments from the United States and Europe and re-label them as benevolence from the dictator.Most of what Africa needs the West cannot give, and that’s the rule
of law, private property rights, an independent judiciary and limited government. The one important way we can help is to lower our trade barriers.
Since the 1980s, New York City’s poverty rate has generally hovered between 19-21%, and remains higher than the national rate—especially for children and seniors. Using 2011-2015 data, the report finds that nearly 1.7 million New Yorkers were
living in poverty.
More than half of the neighborhoods in the Bronx are high poverty or extreme poverty areas, less than 7% are on Staten Island and less than 4% are in Queens.
The study finds stark differences in neighborhood
conditions between high-poverty and low-poverty areas. New York City’s higher-poverty neighborhoods have higher violent crime rates, poorer performing schools, and fewer adults who are college educated or employed. There are also significant
differences in who is living in these neighborhoods. Poor black and Hispanic New Yorkers and poor children are much more likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods than other poor New Yorkers.
In roughly 20% of New York
City neighborhoods at least 30% of households are living below the federal poverty line. Even more troubling: the report finds that this poverty concentration—the extent to which poor New Yorkers are living in neighborhoods with other
poor New Yorkers—worsened between 2010 and 2015. Neighborhoods housing 16.5% of New York City residents saw their poverty rate increase by more than 10 percentage points between 2010 and 2015; fewer neighborhoods (home to 2.6% of
New Yorkers) saw a drop in poverty rate of this magnitude.
The poverty rate in New York City is higher than the U.S. poverty rate—particularly for children and seniors. While 30% of New York City children were poor in 2011-2015,
just 22% were poor nationally. The poverty rate for seniors in New York City (18%) is twice the poverty rate in the U.S. (9%). The report also identified significant racial disparities among those living in poverty; poor black and Hispanic
New Yorkers are much more likely to be poor than white and Asian New Yorkers.
1. The people directly affected by the problems or issues of poverty in the community have to be actively and authenically participating in the efforts to fight poverty. This means
that the affected people themselves will be the major participants of the intervention to fight poverty. Not only the formal leaders need to be consulted, but also the affected themselves. Their worldview and situation should be taken
into consideration and through facilitation they become part of the process of addressing and resolving their problems.
2. Create an organized group within the community to help many people rather than working with a few individuals. Rather
than working with individual persons, it is more effective to facilitate collective and organized actions to help strengthen and empower people in poverty through an organization. This means that it is not enough to provide assistance
to individually affected persons alone but through a collective organization each individual is developed and steps are taken to address their problems and other problems in the future.
3. The people affected need to identify the issues. It
is more effective when issues and problems are identified by the people. They then begin to gain self-confidence and acquire capabilities in working together on simple issues and problems. This means that their initial efforts and experience
can be used towards addressing more complex problems and issues. It is in identifying and acting on their initial simple issues or problems that the affected people gain their self-confidence and capability to identify other issues or
problems which need to be addressed. Though externally, well thought introduced projects can help fight poverty, without the people’s active involvement and linking these projects with their own situation, identified issues and problems,
such projects will most likely not be sustained.
4. People in poverty need to understand that they can often address and solve their own issues. The affected people going through
the process of fighting poverty should have a raised level of consciousness about their situation and their capabilities in order to sustain their collective efforts and also to address other issues and problems.
5. Fighting poverty takes time.
The process of fighting poverty is not a simple and short–termed process, especially if we want a deep transformation to take place to those affected. It takes time to enable and facilitate the affected people so they can break the
“culture of silence” and become actors of their own development.