Category: Poverty

According to a draft World Bank Report, violence, mostly directed at women, remains a significant problem in Kenya. The violence includes rape in schools, under-age prostitution, land clashes and political thuggery. It is estimated that 10 percent of young women in Kenya have attempted suicide. This seems to be a remarkable figure, as males are normally more prone to suicide attempts in other countries.

Vigilante groups are often set up as a response to the perceived inadequate official response to general lawlessness, and perceived corruption of law enforcement agencies and the judiciary. Police action in response to crimes often occurs in a random manner, and there is little public confidence that the actual offenders are ever arrested. Unfortunately scapegoats often suffer beatings and death at the hands of vigilantes and police.

Around 650,000 children are orphans, primarily as a result of AIDS. All up, it’s a pretty grim picture. No matter how much foreign aid is made available, it will not be possible to eradicate extreme poverty in Kenya until the systemic elements which cause poverty are eliminated. Violence and lawlessness are key systemic issues which result directly in poverty.

The Transparency International policy paper on Poverty, Aid and Corruption highlights the correlation between the amount of foreign aid available in a country and the level of corruption experienced by that country. This is largely as a result of two problems: the people who administer the aid are not accountable to the recipients, and aid projects are typically not subjected to rigorous evaluation.

The intended aid recipients never get to hear about how much funding they were supposed to have received, and they would have no-one to complain to if they were to complain about the misappropriation of their funds. As a consequence, aid money is easy money for corrupt politicians and administrators.

Western donor governments want to give aid to the poorest countries. The problem is that the poorest countries usually have corrupt governments. Accordingly, the donor governments look for ways to justify giving money to bad governments. They give money to particular countries as a reward for being ‘slightly less corrupt’ this year than they were last year, or as a reward for political policies such as supporting the ‘War on Terror’.

A problem with the free market economy is that it exists only in textbooks. A slum in Nairobi could be regarded as an ultimate free market economy. There is minimal government intervention, because the police are too scared to enter. There are no rules, so that the market forces are not distorted by external influences. But what actually happens is that the biggest and meanest are the ones who win. There is no incentive for people to be productive when the fruits of their labour will be stolen by someone else.

In fact, a free market economy can only work effectively to the benefit of all participants if the participants voluntarily submit to the rules of the game, such as: no stealing, no cheating, no misleading conduct, always describe your goods accurately, always provide your highest quality services, and always deal honestly and fairly. Any breach of these rules acts like a tax on the marketplace and penalises everyone, so that everyone ends up poorer.

If people agree voluntarily not to engage in shoplifting, then the shop owner does not need to incur high costs of security, and the goods can be sold at a lower price. If the car mechanic can be relied on to tighten the nuts on all the car’s wheels, the car owner does not have to incur the cost of car crashes caused by wheels falling off.

Controversial New York University economics professor William Easterly has published an article in the Los Angeles Times arguing that the media and the international development establishment have been portraying Africa as a more backward basket case than it really is. He says that cellphone and Internet usage has doubled every year for the last seven years, and foreign private capital inflows to Africa exceeded foreign aid in 2006.

According to Easterly, foreign aid won’t be what helps Africans to escape from poverty. They will be escaping “the same way everyone else did – through the efforts of resourceful entrepreneurs, democratic reformers and ordinary citizens at home.” At the TED Conference in Africa in June, Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda said, “What man or nation has ever become rich by holding out a begging bowl?” Bono, who was in the audience, and who is a strong supporter of foreign aid, shouted out his disagreement.

As a result of my own experiences with foreign aid on the ground in Africa, I tend to agree more with the position taken by Mwenda and Easterly than with that of Bono. Mwenda’s argument that 30 years of Western aid to Africa has achieved nothing seems to be supported by the statistics, although to be fair to Bono, he advocates intelligent use of foreign aid, rather than repeating the mistakes of the past.

Are you sick of looking at tables of numbers in books, and trying to deduce relevant information from them about, say, the relationship between income and infant mortality rates? Sometimes the statistics are dressed up in bar charts or pie charts, but it still tends to be tedious stuff. But now Gapminder has come up with a completely new way of presenting statistics which is far more useful and informative than any method I have ever seen.

The Gapminder charting tool is hosted by Google, and it’s free for anyone to use. Gapminder is a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software for visualising human development. One of its founders was Hans Rosling, a professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. He was also a co-founder of Médecins sans Frontièrs (Doctors without Borders) Sweden.

Hans has given two amazing presentations at TED conferences in 2006 and 2007, demonstrating his software in a very entertaining manner. Both of these are available for free viewing online. The 2006 talk was entitled Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen, and his 2007 talk was entitled New Insights on poverty and life around the world. The TED website has many other videos which are worth watching.

According to a World Bank report, the extent of corruption in Africa is decreasing. I’m not sure exactly how you measure corruption — Transparency International creates an annual Corruption Perceptions Index based on surveys and expert opinions – but if the report is accurate, it’s good news for the people of Africa.

Aid organisations often talk about poverty traps. People are trapped in poverty because of systemic forces which are beyond their control. No matter how hard they work, they are unable to escape from poverty. Corruption is one of the major systemic causes of poverty traps. A few years ago a survey in Nairobi revealed that small businesses were paying around 30% of total turnover in bribes. Even in the wealthiest nations, very few enterprises have profit margins over 30%, and accordingly it is almost impossible to run a profitable business in a corrupt country.

Corruption is an issue which cannot be solved by increasing aid. The more aid money provided to a corrupt country, the more corruption there is, and the more local market forces get distorted, thereby damaging the incentive for people to work diligently and productively.

They say that your expertise increases in proportion to your distance from home. When I’m visiting Africa, people often assume that I’m an expert on subjects of which I have only a passing knowledge. I think the reverse is true for responsibility, which decreases in proportion to your distance from home. So if you’re a long way from home, you can be an expert with no responsibility.

There aren’t many people in Australia who wouldn’t lend a hand to stop a next-door neighbour from starving to death as a result of poverty. Most people would help the neighbour find appropriate community services, and would even provide meals from time to time. However, when it’s people who live a long way away, people that you’ve never met, and there are large numbers of them, somehow it ceases to be your problem. Australians have enough problems to worry about. Africans can look after themselves.

Followers of Jesus aren’t free to take this attitude. When Jesus answered the question, Who is My Neighbour, with the story of the Good Samaritan, he implied that each of us is responsible for anyone who is in need. So you don’t have an option of ignoring poverty. You can’t be a follower of Jesus unless you’re doing something to address the world’s problems.