Category Archives: Poverty
Is the Development Community’s Focus on Fighting Poverty Passé
Fighting poverty is the most important issue to the development community. It stirs passions, brings in the money, attracts the most attention—and thus sits at the top of everyone’s agenda.
When the new head of the World Bank, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, engages the wider public, he asks, “What Will It Take to End Poverty?” When the prime minister of the United Kingdom touts his accomplishments in the development field, he writes about “Combating Poverty at Its Roots.” And when NGOs fundraise, they stir your heart by telling you, “Sponsoring a child is the most powerful way you can fight poverty.”
But given great reductions in absolute poverty (from 55 to 22 percent of the developing world’s population over the past three decades) and great improvements in the lives of the poor, is this focus on poverty reduction detracting from more important issues? (more…)
More on Economic Development, Foreign aid, Governance, Poverty
Promoting Human Rights in non Western Countries
A key challenge faced by those engaged in international human rights policy and practice is adopting an effective framework for protecting and promoting human rights around the world in a way that preserves and articulates their universal nature, while at the same time respecting local values and practices.
One way to approach this challenge is to examine values, norms, customs and practices in non-Western cultures which can act as ‘receptors’ for human rights principles and practice. A new Dutch collaborative research project adopts just such an approach (and is thus called the ‘Receptor Approach’). It brings together experts from around the world and from a variety of disciplines – law, anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations and philosophy among others. (more…)
More on Africa, East Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Policies, Poverty, Religion, South Asia
How Far do Perception Surveys Take Us in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Situations?
By Richard Mallett, Overseas Development Institute
Although we may not always agree on the specifics – or the application of the concept given its political sensitivities – there is a degree of consensus on the general traits of state fragility. These include, for example, weak capacity to provide basic services, public security and rule of law; inability to manage political conflict; and delegitimization of the state. But this year’s Global Monitoring Report, produced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, threw a new trait into the mix. “Fragile states,” it argued, are characterized by, among other things, a “lack of timely and reliable statistics on the basis of which policies can be formulated.” (more…)
More on Conflict and Security, Foreign aid, Fragile States, Poverty
How Foreign Aid Succeeds and Fails at the Same Time
There is a sharp dichotomy in opinions about foreign aid.
Many, from Jeffrey Sachs to Bill Gates to Charles Kenny, have argued that it has been a great success. As Gates explains:
Aid money can and does work. It improves people’s lives and makes the world a better and safer place. . . . Wasteful and corrupt aid projects are probably inevitable, and they should never be tolerated. But overall, when you look at the big picture, quite a lot of good things are happening.
Others, most famously William Easterly and Dambisa Moyo, have argued that aid has not delivered on its promises. As Easterly puts it,
Each foreign aid bureaucracy is responsible for everything, all the aid bureaucracies together are collectively responsible for all this “everything,” and in this bureaucratic maze with no exits, nobody is individually responsible for anything. . . . It is a fallacy to think that overall poverty can be ended by a comprehensive package of “things,” like malaria medicines and clean water.
Is there any logical explanation for this divergence beyond the biases that these personalities have? Is there any way that both groups might be right (or wrong)? (more…)
More on Capacity Building, Foreign aid, Governance, Policies, Poverty
Côte d’Ivoire’s Ethnic, Religious, and Geographical Divisions
Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) may no longer be physically divided, but the scars of its long conflict will linger for years to come. Even if public administration has returned to the north, cocoa producers need no longer export via neighboring countries, and the financial system has been restored, fear still stalks the countryside. Violence persists. Drivers need to avoid troubled areas. And a focus on prosecution of the losers instead of reconciliation ensures that resentment will continue to fester.
Although it was once West Africa’s best run country, Côte d’Ivoire has long suffered from deep ethnic and geographical inequities that made conflict much more likely. As the following maps show, these inequities can be traced back to colonial times, and to the policies followed by successive governments since independence. Unbalanced development is a recipe for trouble in countries divided into a number of large ethnic groups. (more…)
More on Africa, Conflict and Security, Elections, Fragile States, Identity, Maps, Poverty
Initiating and Sustaining Developmental States in Africa
What policies and governance conditions are needed in Africa for it to match the economic and social achievements of Asia? This video, from a presentation at Johns Hopkins University, presents some answers. It presents the findings of two research projects, with important implications for the future of development in Africa. Note the focus on developmental states. It is the nature of the regime more than the way it gains power that matters. (more…)
More on Africa, East Asia, Economic Development, Foreign aid, Governance, Policies, Poverty, Videos
Inequality, Fragile States, and the New MDGs
With the appointment of the United Kingdom’s prime minister, David Cameron, as chair of a forthcoming UN committee tasked with establishing a new set of UN millennium development goals (the existing ones expire in 2015), debate on the issue is expected to heat up in the months ahead.
Many in the development field think the reduction of inequality in poor countries should be a high priority. But this shows a misunderstanding of the problems the poor face in these countries—and what steps must be taken to help them. (more…)
Diagram Explaining the Politics of Inclusive Development
The newly launched Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre (ESID) has put together a diagram that explains the relationship between politics and inclusive development. (more…)
More on Economic Development, Governance, Politics, Poverty
Horizontal Versus Vertical Social Cohesion: Why the Differences Matter
Social cohesion is an underappreciated but crucial element in development, state building, and poverty reduction.
It is an especially important factor in determining whether a state is fragile or not. As I argued in Fixing Fragile States:
Two factors above all others decide how a country’s political, economic, and societal life evolves: a population’s capacity to cooperate (which depends, for the most part, on the level of social cohesion) and its ability to take advantage of a set of shared, productive institutions (especially informal institutions at the crucial early stages of development when formal institutions are usually feeble and ineffectual). . . . These two ingredients shape how a government interacts with its citizens; how officials, politicians, and businesspeople behave; and how effective foreign efforts to upgrade governance will be. Together with the set of policies adopted by the government, they make up the three major determinants of a country’s capacity to advance.
Fragile states are deficient in both these areas. And the combination of political identity fragmentation and weak national institutions works in a vicious cycle that severely undermines the legitimacy of the state, leading to political orders that are highly unstable and hard to reform. (more…)
What to Read on Somalia
In the aftermath of the conference in London on Somalia, I offer a wrap-up of the best articles and books to read on the country.
In the past week, there has been a number of excellent pieces on what the international community has done wrong in the past, and how it might do better going forward.
In general, they all suggest that the focus should be on what is working—in places such as Somaliland, Puntland, and Galmudug—rather than on any foreign blueprint for success.
Past initiatives have repeatedly attempted to impose a centralized bureaucratic governing structure on the country, a structure ill-suited to Somali society. Such efforts have never been effective and have only aggravated domestic tensions.
(more…)
