Last week the deep issues of international development and poverty rolled past the media’s peripheral vision again, as they got mildly excited by David Cameron’s co-chairing of the panel on the Post 2015 Development Agenda. The meetings aim to renew or refresh the Millennium Development Goals which expire in two years’ time, so world leaders are revelling in the opportunity to demonstrate their concern and commitment to helping those less fortunate. But what progress is really made when the cameras stop rolling and the leaders go back to their privileged lifestyles?
The Millennium Development Goals were set up in 2000 by the UN, and served as a concrete commitment to the world to achieve targets and put numbers on the amount of global progress made. Poverty eradication proudly featured as one of the eight goals, and the aim of halving absolute poverty was actually achieved as early as 2008. This has been largely attributed to the rocket growth of India and China, two of the most heavily populated and fastest growing economies in the world, who through this growth have managed to pull millions of people out of poverty. But the means of progress, albeit slower, is still being offered in bite-size chunks to nations who continue to struggle, be this through the top-down or bottom-up approaches. The countries of the world have seized their pick-axes and are chipping away at the problem, declaring with determination: ‘we’re working on it’.
Mr Cameron quite rightly pointed out that the problem cannot be tackled by simply throwing money at countries and hoping that it ends up in the right place. There are many issues with development assistance that were ignored in the past, but thankfully have been increasingly coming to the forefront of the foreign affairs agenda. This ‘modern’ approach involves crucially looking at the reasons behind poverty and what keeps people poor, which are primarily factors such as a lack of rule of law, external and internal conflict, and government and institutional corruption. If the top-down approach is going to be implemented by these national and global institutions, then these barriers need to be knocked down before societies can be built up. Countries riddled with poverty are struggling with much more than not being able to feed everyone; they are more often than not at battle with entrenched disputes about religion, natural resources and undemocratic governments, to name a few.
The DebSoc debate on Friday raised some interesting points about poverty, asking whether it is something that the world could ever eliminate for good. It’s a tough question, but the one thing that the opposing sides agreed on was that we should never stop trying. Political institutions have picked up on the fact that populations care about their fellow nations and therefore vote for those who also do, so spending on foreign aid is often used as a tool to further political interests. In reality though, does this matter if one way or another the world is getting somewhere in its fight to save people’s lives?
But it is not just political institutions that are at war with poverty. Independent from high-profile politics, just in the UK there are thousands of grassroots development charities who believe that we should not stop trying. Their budgets may not stretch into the billions, but each organisation works away at its specialist field. They crucially empower local communities to make change from the bottom up, rather than relying on the top-down approach and hoping that the highly absorptive upper layers of society will be saturated, and allow for a few drops to trickle down. Organisations such as emerge poverty free specialise in this bottom-up approach, working to empower women, to give vulnerable children a childhood, and to support sustainable farming projects as a few examples. Work such as this, and the real touchable impact it has, expresses that it is not merely government and UN involvement that is necessary for the world to develop and overcome poverty, it is the collaboration of institutions and people coming together that smashes the problem the hardest.
Do you want to make real change happen? emerge poverty free are working at Exeter to get students involved in the fight against poverty. They are looking for a student ambassador and people to fundraise and campaign on behalf of those around the world whose voices are muffled. Contact: info@emergepovertyfree.org
exeposedev 