Why the Millennium Development Goals Need the Church (and Vice Versa)

Here's an odd fact about many Christians that I struggle to wrap my head around. Christians care intensely about ending poverty, yet too many care little or are completely unaware of history's most significant--and perhaps successful--efforts to end global poverty.

Over the twenty years from 1990 to 2010, the efforts of countries working to achieve the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have moved 700 million people out of extreme poverty. More than 2 billion people gained access to improved drinking water, a basic necessity of life. Roughly 21 million lives have been saved by tackling malaria and tuberculosis, while the world has made significant strides in reducing hunger. All this progress came from the concerted efforts of the UN, national governments, NGOs, and private citizens and foundations.

Yet many Christians, perhaps out of a traditional American distrust of the UN and intergovernmental agencies, have seemed detached from this effort.

Christians are motivated by the command of Scripture and Jesus Christ's example to care for the poor. They show a great deal of passion and commitment to helping to lift people out of extreme poverty. They give more money to this cause than those who don't go to church. They support several poverty fighting organizations with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. People like Brian Fikkert, an economist, author, and in-demand speaker on poverty, and David Platt, a pastor and best-selling author who moved to a high-crime, low income neighborhood in Birmingham, are near celebrities in Christian circles.

Despite Christians' tireless efforts, however, many neglect the role of the MDGs in ending extreme poverty, and now is the time for this to change.

Over the next two years, governments and institutions around the world will be discussing and debating an agenda for the years following 2015, the expiration date for the current MDGs. While we can celebrate that many of the goals will be met--and some already have been--progress has been uneven across the world and some of the more difficult goals remain. Despite the fact that the world possesses the knowledge, science, and resources, extreme poverty continues to cause tremendous suffering. That's why now is such an important time for Christians to engage this process. The toughest work is still ahead of us.

Christians can bring to the table a unique perspective on poverty that can help to solve its insidious nature. Poverty is often a matter of broken relationships as much as it is about lacking material things. A community's values and behavior can cause or perpetuate poverty, preventing girls from attending school, for example, or turning a blind eye to abuse, violence, or injustice. However, faith and religion are powerful tools that can shape values and change behavior. While these tools can be used badly, often the support of religious communities can be a critical ingredient to the success of antipoverty efforts.

Christians in the US can also help the UN achieve its goals around the world. Roughly 2 million Christians spend $1.5 billion annually to work on projects on behalf of the poor, many of them overseas. I would imagine that these Christians spend more time face to face with those affected by poverty than many UN policy makers. When these Christians engage at the highest policy levels as well as through grassroots efforts, they can become powerful agents of change. And when Christian leaders--in the US and overseas--back this work with their moral authority and leadership, the Christian church around the world could truly help transform the lives of billions of people.

It is time for Christians who care about poverty to recognize and support one of the most important poverty-fighting efforts in the world, while offering the unique contributions of the faith community. There are two ways any Christian can contribute. First, they can add their voice to the post-2015 process by visiting worldwewant2015.org and submitting their own thoughts on the kind of world they would like to live in.

Second, they can pray. This week during the United Nations General Assembly, I gathered with a number of religious leaders in New York City to pray for an end to extreme poverty around the world. As the crisis in Syria rages with millions of refugees, half of them children, we believe that prayer is an essential tool to help end the conflict now and promote peace and development around the world.

Christians have always acted on behalf of the poor. It is time we also engage with all those of good will who seek the same thing.

Rich Stearns is president of World Vision US and author of Unfinished: Believing Is Only the Beginning. 

 

41 Percent of U.S. Women Face Poverty

Added by Annie on September 21, 2013.
Saved under Annie Elizabeth Martin, U.S.
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With the U.S. Census Bureau having reported a stable 15 percent rate of overall poverty in the U.S., the Washington advocacy group, Wider Opportunities for Women, suggests a much different outlook on the ways in which poverty affects individuals around the United States, particularly women. Having founded this statistically driven gender gap, the group says 41 percent of all U.S. women face a degree of poverty. Often just a layoff or illness away from facing economic struggles, the group says this financial insecurity has increased since 2008.

Statistically, women in America are more likely to be poor than men in all racial and ethnic backgrounds. With over 37 million people living in poverty, over half of them are adult single women. Surprisingly so, women in the U.S. are further behind in comparison to women in other areas of the world. This could be all connected to the gender wage gap, with women earning less money than their male counterparts, and the often expensive responsibility of raising children.

In a report entitled Living Below the Line: Economic Insecurity and America’s Families, lead authors Shawn McMahon and Jessica Horning found that 45 percent of American families live on incomes that fail to provide the basic economic security required to support their basic needs. In just four years, the overall financial insecurity rate rose from 38 percent to 45 percent with an increase in poverty of White children and unmarried couples. Children of color were also found at risk of economic security with more than three-quarters of Black children and three-quarters of Hispanic children facing poverty in their households.

As 41 percent of U.S. women face poverty, the U.S. census found little changes between genders since 2002. Even with women working full-time, the calculated minimum salary needed to maintain financial security was $30,000, which is double the average full-time employee earns. “It’s clear that this problem is not going to fix itself,” said CEO, Linda D. Hallman who urges those in Congress and the Obama administration to seek strategies to address this gender gap problem.

Even with these alarming poverty statistics, little is to be said about the 85 percent of the U.S. population living above the poverty line, whom, “Live on the edge and are chronically at risk of financial crisis,” said the report. Taking into consideration the workers of America who struggle to meet health, housing, food, child care and various requirements needed for stability, the report urges that studies look into other areas of those not only in poverty, but at risk, having found that one in ten households with two full-time workers were found to lack the earnings necessary for security, while one in five households headed by someone with a four-year degree faced economic insecurity.

The report goes on to note that half of all American’s could lack overall security incomes by 2014, and with 41 percent of U.S. women facing poverty compared to 36 percent of men, this gender gap could increase and provide further problems for U.S. families struggling to make ends meet.

Written by Annie Elizabeth Martin

http://guardianlv.com/2013/09/41-percent-of-u-s-women-face-poverty/

Was state senator Obama right that poverty causes terrorism?

 

BY JOSHUA KEATING

SLATE

With the 12th anniversary of 9/11 last week, several people are sharing a scanned page from the Sept. 19, 2001, issue of the Hyde Park Herald, featuring reactions to the attacks from several politicians, including one State Sen. Barack Obama. Obama wrote:

President Obama

The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair. . . . We will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe — children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.

The theme of terrorism as a symptom of poverty was a popular one from that era. George W. Bush also said that “We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror.” But the argument that poor and uneducated people are more likely to become terrorists is more controversial than you might think.

The 9/11 hijackers and plotters, after all, were predominantly educated men from comfortable backgrounds, an extremely wealthy one in Osama bin Laden’s case. But the causal relationship has also been difficult to demonstrate on a more general level.

A widely cited 2002 paper by economists Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova (also summarized in a New Republic article) found that support for attacks against Israeli targets among Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza did not decrease among those who were more educated and wealthier. They also found that “a living standard above the poverty line or a secondary school or higher education is positively associated with participation in Hezbollah,” the Lebanese military group. Israeli settlers who attacked Palestinians also tended to be wealthier than average. A 2004 study by the Harvard economist Alberto Abadie found that this was also true at the country level: Terrorist risk is not significantly higher for poorer countries.

But there may also be another side to the story. The political scientist Ethan Bueno de Mesquita argues that economic conditions affect terrorist recruitment in a more subtle way. Terrorist groups are more likely to want to recruit people with useful skills; in other words, those with more education and success in the labor market. But it becomes easier for them to do so during economic downturns, when there are fewer nonterrorist opportunities available.

And indeed, a 2011 study using microlevel data on the Palestinian economy found “evidence of the correlation between economic conditions, the characteristics of suicide terrorists, and the targets they attack. High levels of unemployment enable terror organizations to recruit better educated, more mature and more experienced suicide terrorists, who in turn attack more important Israeli targets.” A recent country-level analysis by three German economists found evidence that “education may fuel terrorist activity in the presence of poor political and socio-economic conditions, whereas better education in combination with favorable conditions decreases terrorism.”

SOURCE: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/09/15/3626542/was-state-senator-obama-right.html

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/09/15/3626542/was-state-senator-obama-right.html#storylink=cpy

Why women should own their land

By Deborah Horan on 06 September 2013

 inShare

Women harvesting tea leaves at a plantation in Mehma Sarja Village in Punjab, India, a country where women's right to own land is increasingly recognized. Photo by: F. Fiondella (IRI/CCAFS) / CC BY-NC-SA

The solution seemed simple enough. By adding a second blank line to official land title documents in Madagascar, a wife’s name could be registered as co-owner of the plot she tilled with her husband. As co-owner, she could secure her claim to the family farm in case of widowhood or divorce.

For a while, the strategy appeared to work, at least in some parts of the country. Women’s names began appearing on land deeds in some districts. But when researchers checked later, they found that the second line had been dropped with no explanation for the change. Land registration officials told them the issue was not a priority.

Changing attitudes, it turned out, proved more difficult than altering the lines on a page.

“It’s a really great example and also depressing,” said Renee Giovarelli, a lawyer with Landesa who came across the case while working on women’s rights to land in the east African nation. “This is the thing about women’s land’s rights: Social norms are so difficult to change.”

Women account for nearly half of the world’s smallholder farmers in developing countries, according to some estimates, and they increasingly make up the majority of farmers in places where men have moved to cities in search of work. But they also often don’t have recognized rights to the land they till. Most access land through their husbands or sons, plant in areas where property is communal, or work as day laborers on large collectives.

When women own the land they till, families tend to be better fed, better educated and healthier, research suggests. Daughters tend to marry at an older age and wives tend to suffer less incidents of domestic violence. Babies are born with higher birth weights. Food security and economic development increase.

“Assets under women’s control give women greater bargaining power and often contribute more to important welfare outcomes for the household, in children’s education, for instance,” said Ruth Meinzen-Dick, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, which has researched the impact of land ownership on women’s rights in Africa and elsewhere.

Roy Prosterman, founder of the Landesa Rural Development Institute, put it more bluntly: “Any amount that gets into his hands is net of expenditures on cigarettes, gambling, tea, soft drinks, hard drinks, non-essential [items]. What’s left gets applied to family, medical care and education.”

The global movement to recognize womens land tenure is growing. While land is a critical asset for all of the rural poor — often it is their only asset and a main source of food security — recognizing women’s claims in particular may better feed families. One study, for instance, found that low-income female-headed households had better nutrition than higher-income households headed by men. One reason, said Amanda Richardson, a fellow at Landesa, is that men tend to grow commercial crops, while women tend to focus on family gardens.

Several countries have been taking steps to formally recognize women’s land rights. Bright spots include India, where a government program has registered tens of thousands of micro-plots either jointly to a husband and wife, or to a woman only, and Kenya, where constitutional reforms recognize women’s claims to land.

But even in those instances, women’s gains were not always clear. In India, for instance, many women did not know their names had been added to land deeds, while in Kenya, rural women often thought the constitution applied only to people living in Nairobi, researchers said.

“There isn’t a magic wand or magic legislation,” Meinzen-Dick said. “Just writing a new law on land rights doesn’t necessarily change things in practice.”

Work with governments to change property laws

International development organizations are working in many ways to ensure that laws are reformed and attitudes begin to change so that women’s land rights can be recognized, both formally and informally. A first step is often to help governments create policies and programs that promote land tenure security for women.

In India, development organizations worked with authorities to add a second line to land deeds, similar to the initiative in Madagascar. When they discovered women did not know they were landowners, these groups organized training for women and men to learn about land rights.

In Latin America, several development agencies have been working with governments to secure land titles, including adding a second line to land deeds to jointly title land belonging to a husband and wife — an effort that Carmen Diana Deere characterized as a “major struggle.”

“That was a major change,” she said. “It should be recognized that, hey, women are farmers too. You can’t assume that by benefiting the man, you’ll benefit everybody in the household.”

In 2003, the Ethiopian government began to give joint title to land belonging to married couples as part of a community-based land registration program. Those reforms, coupled with marriage law reforms that grant women assets after they divorce, have led to greater recognition of women’s land rights.

Work with communities to change attitudes

Getting societies to accept a government’s policy change can be difficult.

“The next step, which is perhaps even more challenging, is what to do about it once you get recognition,” Meinzen-Dick said.

Traditional views can be difficult to alter; indigenous groups, for instance, often apply their own customs to land ownership, which is typically communal.

Moreover, marriage and inheritance laws or tribal customs often favor the husband’s or sons’ rights to assets, including land. Societal attitudes often hold that women should not have a stake in land or customs allow men to sell land without the wife’s consent. These customary laws can work fine — unless a family breaks apart.

“Women have to make sure that their names are written down on everything so that when push comes to shove, that right is actually recognized,” said Carmen Diana Deere, distinguished professor of Latin American studies at the University of Florida’s Department of Food and Resource Economics.

In Kenya, Landesa field workers out to change attitudes toward women’s land ownership first targeted community elders, educating them on how the country’s new constitution affects land and property rights. Then they trained teachers so that students could bring what they learned home to their parents. They trained men. And only then did they begin to train women.

“By the time we got to the women, the rest of the community had already been primed,” said Landesa’s Richardson. “It wasn’t seen as us coming in and disrupting society.”

Sometimes, cultural taboos make it difficult for women to attend public meetings or to meet with international development agencies without the men of the community also in attendance.

In Laos, for instance, development agencies working to increase awareness of women’s land ownership rights initially held meetings with men and women together so that men could learn what the women were hearing. Then they met with women alone so that they felt more comfortable asking questions.

Determine how much land is tilled by women

Estimating how much land women lay claim to is tricky. In countries where property is communal, neither men nor women “own” the land they till. Moreover, there is dearth of data on land ownership in developing countries, and what data there is often mixes data points.

Several initiatives have begun collecting land ownership data based on gender, including the Gender Asset Gap Project, which is working to determine ownership in Ghana, India and Ecuador, and the Evidence and Data for Gender Equity or EDGE project, an initiative supported by U.N. Women, the World Bank and others.

“Collecting this kind of data is relatively simple,” said Cheryl Doss, a senior lecturer at Yale University who helps to analyze women’s access to land and other assets in Liberia and Uganda through the Assets and Market Access Collaborative Research Support Program, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. “As organizations begin to realize how important and useful having this kind of data is, my hope is that it will become routine to collect [it].”

Provide training

In 2009, Landesa launched an innovative program in India called the Security for Girls Through Land Project, which sought to improve girls’ social and economic prospects by training them about land and property rights. The project has reached more than 7,000 girls in nearly 300 villages, and is expanding to reach 35,000 more this year. In addition to learning about land rights, girls learn to cultivate small “kitchen gardens” that they can use to feed their families or sell for income.

The project is one of too few that provide agricultural training to women in developing countries, according to the City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development, a U.K.-based organization that promotes international education and training. The group found in 2009 that most training programs were targeted primarily at men.

“It’s the exception rather than the rule,” said Roy Prosterman, founder of Landesa. “Most training programs, tech training and other support for farm households tend to focus on the male to the extent that they exist at all. It’s very important to have models for such programs that focus on women. Not only adult women, but also girls in their teens.”

Such programs may encourage women to focus on more than just crafts or the canning and processing of food, but instead on agriculture or starting their own business.

SOURCE: https://www.devex.com/en/news/why-women-should-own-their-land/81754?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonv6TLdO%2FhmjTEU5z16uUsXaS%2Bh4kz2EFye%2BLIHETpodcMS8tiMq%2BTFAwTG5toziV8R7bNKc1r2NkQXBfn

Can We Eliminate Extreme Poverty By 2030?

Over the last 200 years the world as a whole has seen a marked decline in the incidence of absolute poverty.
                          

 The success of Western Europe and North America over the 19th and 20th Centuries in reducing absolute poverty is well-known, as is the success of China and India in more recent times. We have also seen encouraging signs of faster progress against poverty in much of Africa since the late 1990s. The proportion of the world’s population living below (say) $1-a-day has fallen from over 80% in the early 19th century to under 20% today.
We have also seen a marked transition in thinking about poverty. Observations of poverty have long interacted with prior ‘theories’ (including ideologies) to yield an ‘interpretation’ of the causes of that poverty, with possible implications for action. Two stylised interpretations can be distinguished in past thought, both scholarly and popular.

• In the ‘utility of poverty’ interpretation, some people are poor largely because of the choices they make and there is little reason to think that they have the potential to be anything else than poor;

And their poverty is seen as necessary for the country’s economic success, which requires a large number of people eager for work, and avoiding hunger is seen as a necessary incentive for doing that work. The view of Patrick Colquhoun (1806), the founder of the modern police force, is a fair representation: “Poverty is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man – it is the source of wealth”. This appears to have been the dominant mainstream view until well into the 19th century, and versions of this view survive today, though it is clearly no longer dominant.
Past advocates of the ‘utility of poverty’ saw little hope for poverty reduction through technical progress and economic growth, given the claimed lack of ‘moral restraint’ amongst poor people. Classical economists (from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill) acknowledged the logic of policies for mass education to change behaviours and thus assure more pro-poor growth in a capitalist market economy. But there was little enthusiasm for public intervention to foster basic schooling for all children until the late 19th century. There was reasonably broad support within the elites for policies that helped protect people from transient poverty due to downside risks even when mass poverty was taken for granted (England’s Old Poor Laws, dating from Elizabethan times, were an early and seemingly successful example of such policies). But public action to reduce chronic poverty had few advocates.

• The second, alternative, interpretation sees poverty as stemming in large part from market and other institutional failures;

One version came to prominence in the socialist movements of the mid-19th century, whereby poverty was seen as an inevitable consequence of capitalism. Similarly to the classical economists, Karl Marx was skeptical of the prospects of poverty-reducing growth under capitalism, but not because of the moral failings of poor people; rather he believed that full-employment would be impossible, and the ‘reserve army’ of the unemployed would hold back any wage gains.
As economic analysis deepened, a version of the institutional-failures idea emerged in which market failures interact with initial inequalities to impede progress against poverty. For example, credit constraints entail that children in poor families do not attract the investments – in nutrition, health care and schooling – they need to eventually escape poverty. Threshold effects, such as the existence of a (positive) lower bound to human capital in order to be productive, create the potential for poverty traps. General equilibrium effects, notably on the distribution of labour earnings given unequal human capital endowments, entail that the benefits of labour-augmenting technical progress are shared quite unequally. Governments fail in not adequately addressing these problems. There were hints of these ideas in 19th-century economic literature, but well-developed formulations did not emerge until the late 20th century.
This version of the institutional-failures idea saw poverty as a social ill that can be avoided through public action in a capitalist market economy. Furthermore, doing so came to be seen as perfectly consistent with growth in such an economy. Indeed the right policies were expected to contribute to that growth by removing material constraints on the freedom of individuals to pursue their own economic interests.
Steps in the transition
The ascendancy of the institutional-failures view was highly uneven over time, with long periods of inaction and many set-backs. However, two significant historical steps can be identified, which I dub the First and Second Poverty Enlightenments. The First Poverty Enlightenment was in the 20 or so years prior to the turn of the 19th century. Popular critiques of prevailing social hierarchies blossomed in London and Paris, in the latter case famously culminating in the French Revolution. The philosophical writings of Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Smith and others articulated a new respect for poor people as people, not merely serving some purely instrumental role as means of production. The economy itself came to be seen as a means for promoting all human welfare.
Adam Smith’s (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776) influential critique of the mercantilist view that a country’s progress should be judged by its balance of trade was an important step in opening the way to (eventually) seeing progress against poverty as a goal for development, rather than a threat to it. Smith also argued in favor of promotional antipoverty policies, such as public subsidies to help cover schooling costs of the ‘common people’. But on this and other social issues, Smith was evidently far more progressive than most of his peers or near-term followers. Classical economists such as Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo were hostile to the idea of antipoverty policy, pointing to adverse incentive effects, although (not for the last time) such effects were almost certainly exaggerated, such as in the intense and influential early 19th-century debates on reforming England’s Poor Laws (Ravallion 2013a). While the recognition that institutions were at least partly responsible for poverty was a crucial step, it would be a long time before we saw the emergence of comprehensive antipoverty policies that could promote as well as protect.
The Second Poverty Enlightenment came in the period around 1960-80, with continuing influence today. This saw both a steeper pace of decline in the global poverty rate and intellectually stronger and better-informed arguments for antipoverty policy. Mass attention to poverty also reached its historical peak. This is evident if one enters the word ‘poverty’ in the Google Books Ngram Viewer; there was a sharp increase in the 1960s and by the first decade of this decade references to ‘poverty’ as a proportion of all published words reached its highest value in 300 years, in both English and French. The institutional failures interpretation had clearly become dominant over the utility of poverty. Debates continued of course. Some still blamed poor people for their poverty. Some did not see poverty as a global concern. However, a reasonably broad consensus emerged that poverty was morally unacceptable and across the globe – including in the newly free countries of the developing world – there was new optimism about the scope for fighting poverty. While mistakes happened, and some optimistic but ill-conceived plans were soon frustrated, numerous policy innovations emerged in both rich and poor countries. Incentive effects were still debated, though with better evidence to draw on. A combination of directly promotional policies with robust pro-poor growth in a reasonably open market economy came to be seen as key to fighting poverty. Old-style protection policies also came to incorporate incentives for promotion, such as transfers to compensate poor families for the costs (including foregone labour income) of schooling their children.
While the foundation for the transition in thinking was laid in the First Poverty Enlightenment, it was really only by the latter half of the 20th century that it came to be understood that freedom, self-fulfillment and overall prosperity required (amongst other things) that people were not held back by poverty and that governments had a responsibility to help assure that they were not. Philosophical and economic thought played an important role (in the writings of John Rawls, Amartya Sen and others), but so too did more popular works (such as by Michael Harrington and JK Galbraith). The state was seen to have a role in assuring that all individuals had access to the essential material conditions for their own fulfillment – arguably the most important requirement for equity, but also the key to breaking out of poverty traps. Good public education, sound health systems and financial inclusion all came to be seen as crucial elements for the next generation of poor families to escape poverty, for good.
Three mutually reinforcing factors stand out in explaining both this shift in thinking and falling poverty incidence globally: new technology, new knowledge and political voice. New technologies created economic opportunities and demands for new skills in the workforce, which mass schooling could provide, and a smarter workforce also needed to be healthy. New data and research on poor people influenced public thinking and policy making from the late 19th century, and also taught policymakers about the efficacy of their policy responses. Popular writings, social novels and plays also helped transform knowledge into public awareness. Success of the (often painful) struggles for broad political representation came roughly hand-in-hand with better informed policy debates and better policies, and were reinforced by new knowledge and awareness.
Conclusions
We live in a far less poor world than 200 years ago and it is a world that has become generally smarter at fighting poverty. The causation undoubtedly goes both ways between our progress against poverty and the transition in thinking. It is a lot harder to make rapid progress against poverty when there is a lot of it, and mainstream thinking 200-plus years ago could not easily entertain the idea of a world without poverty. With some painfully long lags (the time it took before real wage rates rose in the wake of the industrial revolution is especially notable), the heavy lifting out of absolute poverty in Western Europe and North America was eventually done through technical progress, economic growth and (crucially) complementary progress in basic health and education. Opportunities were created, and in due course policies emerged to assure that a great many people could take advantage of those opportunities. Then new options opened up for more focused and effective direct interventions emphasising both promotion and protection. Antipoverty policies have both fuelled, and been fuelled by, rising overall affluence.
With the global incidence of extreme poverty now at its lowest level, and public attention and knowledge at their highest point, the ideal of a world free of such poverty is surely closer than ever. But history also warns against complacency. Just as the heavy lifting in the successful developed countries of today was not easy, the poorest countries today face huge challenges. With a sustained effort, building on past experience, it should be possible to come close to eliminating extreme poverty by 2030 or so. But less optimistic scenarios can also be readily identified, returning to the more sluggish progress of the past.

This article first appeared in voxeu.org.
Author: Martin Ravallion, Director of the Development Research Group, World Bank.

Malawi needs 74yrs to end poverty

 Malawi needs at least 74 years to eradicate its poverty at the rate it is going; a study by Oxford University has shown.

The study comes at a time when the national poverty rate is at 50.7 percent, according to the Third Integrated Household Survey (IHS3) indicating that almost half of the population is poor.

This means that with life expectancy at 52 years, all Malawians currently alive may die before they see prosperity.

The study the Multidimensional Poverty Index or MPI covering 22 countries was carried out by Dr Sabina Alkire and Dr Jose Manuel Roche from the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).

The index measures reductions in multidimensional poverty – overlapping deprivations in health, education and living standards – rather than income.

Accor d ing to the study, Nepal, Rwanda and Bangladesh were the 'star performers' of the 22-country study, with the largest absolute reductions in multidimensional poverty, followed by Ghana, Tanzania, Cambodia and Bolivia.

The release of OPHI's findings on changes in poverty follows the publication of the MPI in the UN Development Programme's flagship Human Development Report (HDR) for 2013.

The global MPI, which was developed by OPHI and the UNDP in 2010, has been published in the HDR ever since, and assesses multidimensional poverty in 104 countries for which data are available.

The ability of the MPI to reveal inequalities at a regional level, as well as between social groups, makes it a vital tool for policy makers.

"Using this measure, we found that reductions in intensity – the percentage of deprivations people experience at the same time – were strongest in relatively poorer countries such as Ethiopia, Malawi and Senegal," said Alkire, who is OPHI Director.

"This highlights the vital importance of using MPI, not just the percentage of poor people, to incentivize and celebrate progress and provide a more balanced picture of poverty even in the poorest places."

According to the study, if the study's star countries, Nepal, Rwanda, and Bangladesh, continue to reduce poverty at the current rate, they will halve MPI in less than 10 years and eradicate it in 20. However, the picture in other countries looks much less positive.

"At the current rate of reduction, it will take Ethiopia 45 years to halve multidimensional poverty; in other words, to achieve poverty levels equivalent to those Nigeria has now," said OPHI's Dr José Manuel Roche, who calculated the predictions.

"Based on the same assumptions, it will take India 41 years and Malawi 74 years to eradicate acute poverty as measured by the MPI. But we hope that by providing a more complete and balanced picture, these measures will help spur the eradication of multidimensional poverty," he added. According to IHS3, 25 percent of the Malawian population is ultra poor meaning about one in every four people lives in dire poverty such that they cannot even afford to meet the minimum standard for daily-recommended food requirement.

Source, The Daily Times, Friday, 22 March 2013 09:44 story by Taonga Sabola

Dollar benchmark: The rise of the $1-a-day statistic

By Ruth AlexanderBBC News

It's shocking to learn how many people live on less than $1 day - and regular publication of the figures over the last two decades has helped fuel anti-poverty campaigns. But could the statistic actually have done more harm than good?

In the late 1980s, a group of economists at the World Bank in Washington DC noticed that a number of developing countries drew their poverty lines at an income of about $370 a year.
This reflected the basic amount that a person needed to live. Each country had a different sense of what the essentials were, but the figure of roughly $370 was common to all, so the World Bank team proposed it as a global poverty line.
Some time later one of these economists, Martin Ravallion, was having dinner with his wife and, as they chatted, he had what he described as a kind of "epiphany".
If you divide that $370 by 365 days, you get just over $1. And so the catchy "$1-a-day"' concept was born.
Simple, powerful and shocking.
"We intended to have some impact with it," Martin Ravallion recalls. "Make well-heeled people realise how poor many people in the world are."
But it's a lot more complicated, and controversial, than it at first appears.

More or Less: Behind the stats

For a start, Ravallion and his colleagues at the World Bank were not talking about what you could buy if you took an American dollar to a bank and converted it into Indian rupees or Nigeria naira.

A US dollar does go quite a long way in some developing countries.
Instead, the economists calculated a specially-adjusted dollar using something called Purchasing Power Parity, or PPP.
They looked at the price of hundreds of goods in developing countries. And then with reference to national accounts, household surveys and census data, they calculated how much money you would need in each country to buy a comparable basket of essential goods that would cost you $1 in the USA.
You were under the global poverty line if you couldn't afford that basket.
It's still a reality of life for 13% of people in China; 47.5% in Sub-Saharan Africa; 36% in South Asia; 14% in East Asia and the Pacific; 6.5% in Latin America and the Caribbean. Almost 1.3bn people in total.
And surprisingly perhaps, people who live on $1 a day do not spend all of it on that basket of food - on staying alive. They typically spend about 40 cents on other things, says Professor Abhijit Banerjee of MIT.

The first UN Millennium Development Goal focused on halving the number of people living on $1 a day

"Even though they could actually buy enough calories, the fact is they don't. If you look at the people especially in South Asia who live on $1 a day - huge malnutrition.
"They sacrifice calories to buy some entertainment, some pleasure.
"It's a balance between survivalist behaviour and pleasure-seeking behaviour. I think as human beings we need both."
The $1 figure is also an average.
"Poor families… may earn $10 a day and then nothing for two weeks," says Professor Jonathan Morduch of the Wagner School at New York University.
"One season they may earn a lot, one season they may earn very little."
The World Bank's first report on people living on $1 a day came out in 1993. Regular updates since then have played an important role in focusing attention on the world's poor.
But one major reason the number took off and gained a life of its own, was the adoption as the first UN Millennium Development goal to "halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day".
This high-profile target was agreed by the UN General Assembly and embraced by most of the world's development institutions.
Ten days ago, the World Bank declared the goal had been met early.

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Dollar income levels

• The World Bank says using the $1.25 figure as a measure is judging the world by "what 'poverty' means in the world's poorest countries"
• Better-off countries have higher poverty lines
• The median poverty line among developing countries is $2 (ie if national poverty lines are put in order, it's the mid-point)
• The number of people living between $1.25 and $2 has almost doubled between 1981 and 2008

In 1990, 31% of the population of the developing world lived on less than $1 a day - close to 1.4 billion. In 2008, half that proportion did - 14%, or about 800 million.

However, once again, things are more complicated than they may at first appear.
Over the years since the Millennium Development Goal was set, the $1 a day poverty line has been recalibrated. The World Bank's global poverty line measure is now not $1, but $1.25 per day.
When the phrase was first coined in 1993, the purchasing power parity calculations were based on price and consumption data from the 1980s.
But by 2008, the World Bank economists had more and better data on price and consumption, enabling them to refine these calculations - and more developing countries had calculated poverty lines.
So the poverty line was re-set at $1.25, at 2005 PPP calculations. This represented an average of the poverty lines set in 10-to-20 developing countries.
The job of halving the proportion of people whose income is less than $1.25 a day has almost been done, but not quite.
In 1990, 1.9bn people - 43% of the developing world - lived on less than $1.25. In 2008, about 1.3bn, or 22% did.

Despite its success at driving home just how many people are living in extreme poverty, some critics think the $1-a-day benchmark has done more harm than good.
It's a "successful failure", according to Lant Pritchett, an ex-World Bank economist who is now Professor of the Practice of International Development at Harvard University's Kennedy School.
"It's a wildly successful PR device that I think has been a failure in terms of achieving the objectives of improving human well-being in the world," he says.
He argues that it has put a focus on philanthropy more than long-term development - applying a sticking plaster rather than solving the problem.
"Instead of promoting prosperous economies, it's about 'How do we identify and target and get transfers to the few people under this penurious line?' which just isn't the way, historically, anybody has ever eliminated poverty."
And even at $1.25 it is set too low he says - because someone earning $1.25 or $1.50 is still in dire poverty.

Martin Ravallion: The poorest must be the highest priority

Pritchett proposes an additional $10 poverty line be created.
But Ravallion rejects the criticism.
Progress on reducing the numbers living on less than $1.25 a day has mostly occurred thanks to economic growth, he says, rather than handouts.
And while he accepts that people who make it above the $1.25 poverty line remain vulnerable, and that there has been a "bunching up" of people just above the threshold, he says he has always argued that "we should look at multiple poverty lines", not just the $1.25 figure.
"We should look at the whole distribution. That's what I've said from day one," he says. "What I'm also saying is that our highest priority must be the poorest first."
It's is an argument that divides experts in the field.
Professor Banerjee agrees that the $1.25 a day figure plays a useful role, because there is a finite amount of aid that rich countries are prepared to give and it makes sense, he says, for it to be given to the poorest people.
But Professor Morduch says the figure is so low, it has encouraged the idea that people in this minimal income bracket must lead passive, helpless lives, when this is not the case.
In fact, he says, they are keen to save and need tools, such as bank accounts, to help them do so.
"The whole condition of living on $1 a day has much less to do with that average than with the ups and downs. So it's not surprising that households are very actively trying to save," he says.
"They are not living hand to mouth; they are thinking about the future."
Source: BBC