Poverty alleviation: Where do we stand?

World leaders, present and past, have been trying hard to alleviate poverty from their respective countries. Some leaders declared war against poverty fifty years back and some of them became successful to a great extent. Poverty is a worldwide phenomenon which shakes continents, nations and people in various ways. It writhes and squirms people in various depths and levels at different times and phases of their existence.
 There is no nation that is undeniably free from poverty. The main difference lies in its nature and degree.  Nations in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America are currently with the highest level of poverty and consequently, with the lowest level of socio-economic development, facing violence and conflict and burdened with an unspeakably low standard of living.   Studies by economists and analysts show that some countries made amazing progress during the last fifty years in eradicating poverty, especially extreme poverty, by executing strategic planning and crash programmes. Many countries, on the other hand, failed to do so due to wrong policies, lack of political leadership and financial inadequacies. Heaps of criticism are there but the fact is that some progress has, no doubt, been made by some developed and emerging countries and the poverty ratio has been scaled down substantially.
Very recent statistics on global poverty is alarming and it should be a wake-up call for the world leaders. Close to 50 per cent of world's seven billion people live on less than $2.0 one day. Surprisingly, 1 per cent of the population has an income equal to that of entire bottom of 57 per cent.
Poverty is not only about lack of wealth in monetary terms, it also implies the denial of various choices and basic human needs as food, education, health, shelter and human development. Human development includes the ability to live a long, creative and healthy life, maintain self-respect, respect for others and to access national resources needed for a decent and better standard of living.
Political scientists identified four degrees of poverty: i) destitution, which is lack of income sufficient to assure physical survival and to prevent suffering from hunger, remediable or preventable illness; ii) want, which is lack of enough income to support essential welfare; iii) hardship, which is lack of enough to prevent acute persistent discomfort or inconvenience; iv) relative deprivation, which is a lack of enough income, status, or whatever else may be valued to prevent one from feeling poor in comparison to others.  This last category is elastic enough to include millionaires who covet the possessions and power of billionaires.  Another important category of poverty is psychological or spiritual poverty.  This is the most significant form of poverty in an affluent society where physical needs are easily met.
Poverty is endemic across the developed and underdeveloped countries in the world. Although poverty ratio is much lower in the developed economies but poverty in varying degrees is not totally invisible. From the latest statistics, poverty, in terms of percentage, varies from ten to twenty per cent in the developed countries. In Asia and Africa, the ratio is abnormally high. Asia, the mostly populated continent, has the strongest and perennial presence of poverty in some of the South and South-Eastern regions. Right now, many developing and underdeveloped countries in Asia look like post-war Europe in the 1950s. Absolute poverty, rampant illiteracy, unhygienic environment, poor infrastructure are some of the ever-present realities. Poverty and extreme poverty in Asia are caused by large-scale unemployment, big gap between the rich and the poor, inequalities of income, discrimination, political instability, rampant corruption and many more. Lack of mature political leadership, for the most part, is responsible for the poverty. Few East Asian countries made fantastic success in plummeting poverty and reducing the gap between the rich and the poor.
The UNO's Millennium Development Goals (MDGS) are targets framed to fight poverty, achieve universal primary education, combat diseases like HIV/AIDs, malaria and other specific targets. These were set in 2000 and are to be achieved by 2015. The MDGs targets have made much progress in some regions but it could not reach remarkable progress in relieving poverty, especially in South Asia and Africa. The initiative of the MDGs by the UN is a time-bound programme but given the stark realities in most of the poverty-stricken countries, it appears unrealistic.
A large number of the world's poorest countries today lives in Africa. Some African countries like South Africa and Egypt are not quite as poor as others like Angola and Ethiopia. And although in recent years extreme poverty in Africa has shown a slight decline, African income levels have actually been dipping relative to the rest of the world. So, poor Africa has been getting poorer, and 2014 has seen North-East Africa again having starvation for millions in Somalia, Sudan and South Sudan. In Somalia, racial and feudal wars have been deteriorating the famine situation there.
Countries in Africa have often been afflicted by civil wars and incompetent governments. This may, in part, be due to many African countries being colonial creations with artificial borders that make sustainable governance increasingly challenging. Conflict-torn countries with long running civil wars such as Angola, Burundi, Mozambique, Somalia and Uganda have had little effective governments, making it very difficult to ensure supplies or build necessary infrastructure. This has also given neighbouring countries big refugee problems.
Many countries in Africa are now presenting some noticeable signs of headway towards better governance. The African Union has established the voluntary self-monitoring Africa Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) for states on agreed political, economic and corporate governance values. Twenty nine of Africa's fifty three states signed up to participate in APRM by June 2013. The recent changes raise the optimism that the absolute poverty in Africa will be reduced with the passage of time.
Poverty in Latin America is widespread, but in recent years, improvements have been noticed in some countries. Lain America's poorest people are the peasants, whose extreme poverty seems mainly due to imbalanced and inequitable distribution of wealth. Poverty in some Latin American countries has been worsened by migrations, internal conflicts and bad governance. In some Latin American countries, poverty is largely due to the pressure of population growth on scarce resources. In some countries of the region, drug-related social and political instability also helps marmalade poverty. Latin American poverty is worse in some countries like Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru. Latin America is an area where aid debt also seems a major hitch to progress and prevention of hunger and absolute poverty. The recently increasing military spending in the region is also likely to further aggravate the situation.  
Uneven globalisation of businesses and industries triggers competition between highly unequal forces due to disparate levels of economic and technological development and financial strengths. This, until now, has been broadening the span of absolute poverty, thus widening the gap between the rich and the poor of the developed and developing world. Illiteracy, poor governance, wrong and inadequate policies, absence or violation of human rights, failure of the governments to guarantee the basic human needs are integrally in league with poverty. So, addressing poverty is essentially about addressing these in a concerted and planned manner.
 

The writer is a CFO of a private group of industries.
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