Of course, this creates terrible dilemmas for aid agencies: what to do about very poor, distressed people in poorly run countries? But the implications for successful poverty reduction are clear, and readily actionable. Aid harmonization also holds the promise of higher aid effectiveness, to the point of saving the beneficiary countries at least 20 percent of the amount donated or lent—through lower transaction and procurement costs. Without such harmonization efforts, the average African country has to deal with projects at any given time, receives 1, official visits a year, and writes 2, reports each quarter for the aid agencies or NGOs that sponsored the projects.
This problem—along with costly habits of tying procurement to national suppliers of each donor country—is now being seriously addressed by national bilateral and multilateral aid authorities. Four critical areas are increasingly being targeted by aid programs to help the receiving countries lift their own game: good governance, the business climate, education, and connectivity.
All four areas are high-leverage—addressing them enables many other efforts to succeed where they would otherwise fail. Good governance and the eradication of corruption are the prerequisites for many other things to happen. A good business climate is essential to the 5—6 percent growth rates that massive poverty reduction demands in much of the developing world; it means acting on some fifty items, from sound banking through customs cleanups to microfinance.
Together, these changes represent a quiet revolution in aid and poverty reduction programs. They could double or triple the impact of aid in the decades to come.
But that quiet revolution is less than halfway engaged. The best clients are the poor themselves: when they participate and take ownership of the programs that affect them, the effectiveness of those programs soars. In India, when people are alerted about the sums sent to their village for education or sanitation programs and asked to monitor the expenditures, the amount of money that actually serves the intended use is dramatically higher.
But raising the effectiveness of aid through this quiet, qualitative revolution is just one part of the global poverty challenge. The other one, without which the required massive reduction in poverty is unlikely to happen, is the quantitative challenge of channeling more resources from the rich to the developing countries.
People living in poverty struggle to meet basic needs, including having limited access to food, clothing, healthcare, education, shelter and safety. People affected by poverty may also lack social, economic, political or material income and resources. Poverty is a complex web of circumstances that hinders the very survival of people around the world. This is a set of global goals for the world to achieve by , including to:. The consequences of poverty are far-reaching and long-lasting, including child deaths, lack of access to education and food insecurity, all of which can be caused by poverty and in turn can perpetuate it.
Poverty is responsible for the deaths of more than six million children before their fifth birthdays, and a child under 15 dies every five seconds around the world. Poverty contributes to a lack of access to healthcare and immunisations, as well as to proper nutrition, leaving children vulnerable to mostly preventable illnesses such as pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria. Malnutrition is responsible for 45 percent of all deaths in children aged under five. The situation is improving, and the number of deaths has fallen.
In the late s, 20 million children under the age of five died every year. The first blind man, touching its side, described the elephant like a rough wall. Still, the fourth, fifth and sixth men described the elephant like a tree trunk, a fan, and a rope—all based on their impressions of the leg, ear, and tail of the elephant.
Which one was right? Economic, cultural and geographical and environmental understandings of the problem of poverty are like this elephant, though they all have great influence today. However, are they complete enough? General Eisenhower famously suggested that when a problem is hard, enlarge it. There is truth to each of these views of poverty. And the answer is: Poverty is a problem of relationship.
Auth Hash:. Sign in to your account. Find my account. Your Information Have an account? Sign In. Women also bear the brunt of conflict , which adds a layer of inequality to all conflict: During periods of violence, female-headed households become very common.
And because women often have difficulty getting well-paying work and are typically excluded from community decision-making, their families are particularly vulnerable. You might think that poverty causes hunger and you would be right! If a mother is malnourished during pregnancy, that can be passed on to her children, leading to wasting low weight for height or stunting low height for age.
Extreme poverty and poor health often go hand in hand. In countries where health systems are weak, easily preventable and treatable illnesses like malaria, diarrhea, and respiratory infections can be fatal — especially for young children. And when people must travel far distances to clinics or pay for medicine, it drains already vulnerable households of money and assets, and can tip a family from poverty into extreme poverty.
For some women, pregnancy and childbirth can be a death sentence. In many of the countries where Concern works, access to quality maternal healthcare is poor. Pregnant and lactating mothers face a multitude of barriers when seeking care, from not being allowed to go to a clinic without a male chaperone to receiving poor or even abusive care from a doctor. This is especially true for adolescent girls aged 18 and under, leaving mothers-to-be and their children at increased risk for disease and death.
This means that people which is to say, women and girls collectively spend some million hours every day walking long distances to fetch water.
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