This is the third in a series of posts discussing themes raised in Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert’s book When Helping Hurts. In Chapter 2, the authors raise the interesting point that people living in poverty tend to have a different perspective on what poverty means from that held by people living in comparative wealth. People in wealthy countries define poverty as a lack of material things such as food, money, clean water, housing and medicine.
People actually living in poor countries, on the other hand, tend to define poverty in more psychological and social terms, referring to shame, inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation, fear, hopelessness, depression, social isolation and voicelessness. The way we define poverty has a significant influence on the solutions that we attempt to provide, and so a wrong definition will result in the provision of wrong solutions.
Because westerners tend to understand the symptoms of poverty rather than the underlying causes, poverty relief efforts tend to be aimed at treating the symptoms rather than curing the disease. If someone has a lack of material resources, we try to solve the problem by giving material resources, without making adequate inquiry as to what caused the lack of material resources in the first place.