Spotlight
New Delhi, 14 October 2017
Battle Against Poverty
POOR MUST LEAD AGENDA
By Moin Qazi
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the declaration by the
United Nations of 17 October as the International Day for the Eradication
of Poverty. We have still a long way to go for making this world poverty
free. One of the key strategies for eliminating poverty is equipping poor with
the right development tools.
A decade or two ago,
many in India’s development community acted with the best of intentions, but
without the best of evidence. If households lack clean water—help build wells;
if people suffer ill health—set up health services; if the poor lack capital to
start businesses, give them credit. But the actual reality is not simple, it is
very complicated. Well water can be contaminated, people don’t always use their
local clinic, and savings or insurance may be better than credit. In theory,
the poor themselves are in the best position to know what their communities
need and what the right choices are.
Contrary to Third World
assumptions, the Indian poor are willing to pay for quality services if they are
genuinely useful and are available through hassle free systems. Today, the poor
are investing their precious savings in private hospitals and private schools.
They are also borrowing at heavy rates of interest from private finance because
bank loans, despite being cheaper, are mired in thickets of red tapism.
The poor have lost trust in the State’s
bureaucratic system that consumes so many precious mandays, involving loss of
earnings, and may not finally yield any benefits. In fact, the poor are wiser now and understand that in several
cases the loss of income in chasing government departments for official
largesse neutralises the net benefits.
Every year, wealthy countries spend billions
of dollars to help the world’s poor, paying for seeds, beans cows, goats,
textbooks, business training, microloans, and much more. Such aid is designed
to give the poor people things they can’t afford or the tools and skills they
need to earn more. Much of this aid undoubtedly works. But even when assistance
programmes accomplish things, they often do which get far more weightage than
they deserve. More worrisome is the actual price of procuring and giving away
goats sacks of beans and seeds, textbooks, and the like.
Indian planners should not discount
completely the merit of providing certain goods and services to the people at
the bottom of the economic pyramid, but we must understand that poor are not at
the bottom of the knowledge or innovation pyramids. Unless they encourage
building on the resources in which poor people are rich, the development
process will not be mutually respectful and learning cultures will not be fostered
in societies. Inclusive development cannot be imagined without incorporating
diversified, decentralised, and distributed sources of solutions developed by
local people, on their own, without outside help.
For serving the poor and underserved, both
reliably and consistently, a new development approach will have to be designed,
one which treats the rural poor not as objects of charity, but that holds the
development administration accountable and responsive to their needs. This is
only possible when the instruments and institutions of development are placed
in the hands of the poor. Although imported programmes have the benefit of
supplying “pre-tested” models, they are inherently risky because they do not
grow out of local culture and may not take root when transplanted. Home-grown
models have greater chances of success.
The argument for a systemic reordering of the
planning and delivery mechanism to shift from bureaucratic delivery to
participatory development has been made right form early planning era, but
somehow has not been integrated forcefully into our grassroots plans.
We must build the capacity
of our people to solve problems on their own. Approaches to rural development that
respect the inherent capabilities of native people and that systematically
build on experience have a reasonable chance of making significant advances in
improving those people’s lives. With the goal of empowering people, social
development is a process of transforming institutions for greater inclusion, cohesion
and accountability.
A critical success factor is creating organisational
capabilities at local levels that can mobilise and manage resources effectively
for the benefit of the many rather than just the few. Developing skills and competencies in people, and strengthening
institutions and structures that can channel them are a critical part of that
capacity.
We need to commit resources
such as time, talent and strategic counselling to the beneficiaries. Solutions
come from pairing passion with skills and digging deep into the challenge at
hand.
The development
community in India has a vast trove of expertise and wisdom on advancing social
change. However, not all of it is accessible, locked as it is in people’s heads
or within organisations. It is important to enable access to these valuable
lessons, insights and decisions in order to move the field forward.
Grant making is not the
solution. This is not to say that grants are bad; they are just one part of the
solution.
Aid is sometimes given badly or not in the way it should be. Aid is not
purposeful when it is used to patch up the effects of basic differences that
are built into the structure and values of society. In such cases, aid may
amount to actually accepting the injustices of society while trying to mitigate
the results of the injustices.
The right way ahead is to let the poor lead
the development agenda. We need to bring in the poor to the conversation.
Interventions that take the end user into account almost always have better
success rates than top down decision-making ones. When poor communities think
at the human level, all their goals are interconnected. But under the
internationally conceived top-down model, communities are not treated as equal
partners, and the goals have been compartmentalised into project mode, to suit
donors and governments.
Outside aid prevents people from searching
for their own solutions, while corrupting and undermining local institutions
and creating a self-perpetuating lobby of aid agencies. We need to heed the
wisdom of the legendary philosopher Lao Tzu:“Go to
the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they
know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is
done, the task accomplished, the people will say 'We have done this ourselves.”---INFA
(Copyright,
India News & Feature Alliance)
|