Those who are reading this article, just for a moment imagine yourself of not having enough money to feed and clothe your family, not able to send your children to school for education or send them to hospital when they are sick. Just thinking about the thought has possibly made you feel insecure and powerless. Unfortunately, somewhere around 50 million Bangladeshis are passing their everyday life with this miserable thought and living in squalid conditions of hunger, disease, and desperation.
Poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity which can be defined by using three different concepts: income, basic needs and capability. Of these, the most commonly used concept is income, according to which a person is poor if his/her income is below a certain amount. The present benchmark defined by the World Bank as daily consumption of less than $1.25 per person identifies extreme poverty.
Since independence every successive government has given top priority to poverty reduction and it is true that over the past one and a half decades, the country has made significant improvement to eradicating extreme poverty. But still 31.5 per cent of our population lives below the poverty line and if the benchmark is raised to just US$2.00 per day, then number of people living below the poverty line will be much higher.
Currently, in Bangladesh around 67 million people don't have access to improved sanitation and over 51,000 children under five years old die annually from diarrhea. More than 25 million people lack access to a safe water source and two-fifths of children are chronically malnourished. Many communities live around open air sewage systems and have limited knowledge of hygiene. Yet for the privileged minority, the horrors of poverty seem to be a natural, inevitable part of our landscape.
Noble laureate Prof. Dr. Muhammad Yunus believes that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social systems that we have designed for ourselves, the institutions and concepts that make up that system and the policies that we pursue. Our leaders profess their commitment to "poverty eradication," but the systemic causes of poverty are yet to be addressed. The causes of poverty are manifold. Factors like corruption, poor human rights record, absence of good governance, low quality education, poor Tax-GDP (gross domestic product) ratio, natural disaster, and rent-seeking elites create and perpetuate poverty.
Although in recent times, the rate of poverty has gone down but the number of people living below the poverty line has gone up just because of our rapid population growth. In the year 2050, our population will be around 200 million; obviously, it needs no telling, if unchecked, we will have more poor people than we had back in the 70's.
Different studies support the idea that countries which have incorporated population policies and family planning programmes in their overall economic development strategies have achieved significant reductions in poverty. Throughout the developing world, declining birth rates and rising living standards have gone hand in hand. Likewise, with fewer children to care for and raise, families can improve their prospects for escaping the poverty trap.
Since majority of our people are illiterate, their option for work is also limited and hence most of them are involved in agriculture. Though agriculture is very profitable business in developed countries but here, in Bangladesh, farmers have no direct access to market; they need to depend on middle-men who are eating away the profits for the crops they grow. Moreover, they lack access to information on how to farm better using modern technologies. Shortage of good quality seeds and fertilisers, and poor facilities of irrigation lead to poor yield. Our country is also disaster-prone - floods, drought and heavy rains always destroy crops. Since there is no facility of crop insurance, farmers incur huge financial challenges when such events occur, contributing further to deepening poverty.
Many studies have found a positive link between an income-based poverty concept and education in the process of poverty reduction. Education equips people with the knowledge and skills they need to increase income and expand employment opportunities. Greater equity in education can help fuel a virtuous cycle of increased development and accelerated poverty reduction, with benefits for the poor and society as a whole.
It is, however, undeniable that economic growth is one of the major factors of poverty reduction, but it is not the solution because it may benefit only a few. Instead, it's all about how we grow. We need to ensure that the share of economic benefits from growth reaches the poor. Solutions to poverty cannot be based exclusively on economic policies, but will require a comprehensive set of well-coordinated measures. Â
In a recent report, released jointly by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), World Bank and United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), reveals that, of a total of 49.4 million poor people of the country, 15.9 million or 32.3 per cent lives in Dhaka and 8.3 million in Chittagong. This means nearly half of the country's total poor population lives in these two regions which have the highest contribution to the national GDP - with Dhaka metropolis alone contributing 36 per cent and Chittagong 11 per cent.
However, growth and development are two different economic phenomena. Economic growth and economic development are often used interchangeably but there is a difference. Growth refers to the simple increase in per capita income of a country or measured by an increase in a country's GDP. It has no relevance to the much desired economic equality. In contrast, economic development is a qualitative process and refers to structural change of economic and social infrastructure in an economy, which allows an increase in the standard of living of a nation's population.
As such, economic growth alone is not sufficient to reduce poverty. We need to address issues of social protection, good governance and policies of redistribution of wealth - moving money from those with too much of it to those with too little.
A report, released by Oxfam International, entitled, "Working for the few," contains some startling statistics on what it calls the "growing tide of inequality." The report states: Almost half of the world's wealth is now owned by just one per cent of the population. The wealth of the one per cent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion.
That's 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world's population. The bottom half of the world's population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world. Bangladesh is no exception, here also the top few own the lion share of wealth of the nation, while the majority remains in the bottom and owns very little.
Growth associated with progressive distributional changes will have a greater impact on poverty than growth that leaves distribution unchanged. Hence, policies that improve the distribution of income and assets within a society, such as land tenure reform; pro-poor public expenditure and measures to increase the access of the poor to financial markets; investment in human capital; life-long learning and quality education are essential elements of a country's poverty reduction strategy.
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