Film: The End of Poverty?

Have you ever wondered why there are poor countries with populations of impoverished people, that seem they will never to be able to join in the wealth of the so called "global economy?" Poverty is not an accident. 1942 marks the birth of modern times when the conquistadors violently extracted gold and other natural resources. Since then our economic system has been financed by the poor by forcing them to give their land and access to natural resources, then through unfair trade, debt repayment and unjust taxes on labor and consumption. This system was carefully built and maintained by the free market policies, resources monopolies and structural adjustment programs by the World Bank and the IMF. Narrated by Martin Sheen

We Truly are the World

We all have heard this statement before, but how many of us live by this statement?

There comes a time

When we head a certain call

When the world must come together as one

There are people dying

And it's time to lend a hand to life

The greatest gift of all

We can't go on

Pretending day by day

That someone, somewhere will soon make a change

We are all a part of God's great big family

And the truth, you know love is all we need

Send them your heart

So they'll know that someone cares

And their lives will be stronger and free

As God has shown us by turning stone to bread

So we all must lend a helping hand

When you're down and out

There seems no hope at all

But if you just believe

There's no way we can fall

Well, well, well, well, let us realize

That a change will only come

When we stand together as one

~Michael Jackson

This man lived/believed by this statement.

Women at the Helm

Women’s entrepreneurship training constitutes one of the keys for unlocking the creative genius of African women, said Ms. Remi Duyile, a program manager at Gender Entrepreneurship Markets, appealing to women to pursue that path despite the many difficulties and limited access to credit. “Success,” she said, “is a journey. It must never be a destination”.

Ms. Regina Amadi, a retired assistant director general for the International Labor Organization, urged world leaders to attend to what she called “the social dimensions of globalization” and for women around the world to return to what she termed “old time mobilization”: in order to ensure that this decade becomes “an ‘uhuru’ (rallying) moment for gender equality”.

Suggesting that the limited involvement of women in managing global financial issues was one of the reasons for the current global crisis, Baroness Amos, the former leader of the British House of Lords, cited an unnamed source as saying the world might have avoided the current crisis with more women at the helm of financial affairs.

According to Amos: “Someone said the crisis might have been avoided had Lehman Brothers (the last major bank to collapse before stock markets worldwide tanked) had only been Lehwoman Sisters”.

PSA!!!

The typical African youth is an 18.5-year-old girl, poor and living in a rural area.

Weekly Challenge!

There are so many sneaker boutiques within the States.... What I want to do is challenge these boutiques into hosting a charity sneaker show; an instead of donating money donate a pair of new kicks to someone who really needs them. Who's up to the challenge?

The Global Crisis and its Impact on Women and Girls

The global economic crisis, Ezekwesili explained, is likely to hit African women on two fronts. First, it will arrest capital accumulation by women, and second, it will drastically reduce women’s individual incomes as well as the budgets they manage on behalf of households. This would have damaging consequences notably on the girl child.

With the education of boys largely sheltered from shocks and parents often more likely to pull out a girl from school than a boy when tuition becomes hard to find, the World Bank Vice President cited research findings on household income declines in Uganda and a fall in income from agriculture in Madagascar where girls were first to be pulled out of schools.

The World Bank has warned that an additional 700,000 African infants are likely to die before their first birthday as a result of the crisis. The girl child will be hit hardest. Research has shown that “girls are five times more likely to be impacted by increases in infant mortality rate than boys.”

Unlike in rich countries such as the United States, where more men have tended to lose their jobs compared to women, the crisis in Africa is leaving women with ever fewer job choices. In many export-oriented industries – for example, the cut-flower industry in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda and the textile industry in Kenya and Lesotho – it is women, not men, across Africa who are bleeding jobs because of the crisis.

Declining remittances and a tightening of micro-finance lending would further restrict the funds available to women to run their households.

Gender-focused Development Initiatives

Conference participants reached consensus that development and poverty alleviation strategies that fail to target girls and women have little to no chance of success in Africa.

Ms. Ezekwesili drew attention to the Gender Entrepreneurship Markets (GEM) initiative launched by the Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), to enhance women’s access to finance and address gender barriers to the business environment. The $50 million GEM has benefited over 1,500 women in 18 sub-Saharan African countries and will be enhanced by a recent $120 million loan program that the IFC signed with EcoBank to benefit businesswomen in five countries.

In addition, the Bank has adopted a Gender Action Plan and launched an $11 million, three-year Adolescent Girls Initiative to train, mentor, empower and facilitate the transition of young African women to work in Liberia, Southern Sudan and Rwanda. In addition, 83 Bank-funded projects totaling $4.4 billion have female economic empowerment components; the majority of them (33) in agriculture, education (34), infrastructure (11) and private sector development (5).

Other speakers at the conference struck similar chords.

Speaking on behalf of the British ambassador to Washington, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the deputy head of mission, Dominick Chilcott, stressed the link between women’s empowerment and development. The road to sustainable development, he said, is only attainable if it is built on a gender inclusive agenda.

“We must take the opportunities presented by the crisis to innovate and invest in women, whether it is proposals to introduce better social programs, finding ways of integrating women into the labor force, or reducing discrimination in financial markets,” he said, citing remarks by Sheinwald.

In a video message, Ms. Sarah Brown, the spouse of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, spoke of the need for world leaders to tackle “the many injustices that remain” against women.
Ambassador Melanne Verveer, U.S. President Barack Obama’s Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues at the State Department, urged development agencies to “think women”.

“You cannot beat poverty without putting women at the center of your development strategies,” she said.

“Women’s equality is not just the right thing to do, it is also smart economics,” she added, paraphrasing the World Bank. She pointed out that women were key to food security and agriculture; essential players in the promotion of the rights of the child; major actors in health care provision; yet continued to suffer discrimination in powerful board rooms; and on higher rungs of corporate ladders.

In Africa, 'Poverty Has a Female Face'

The global economic crisis will drastically reduce African women’s individual incomes as well as the budgets they manage on behalf of their households, with particularly damaging consequences for girls, said Obiageli Ezekwesili, World Bank Vice President for the Africa Region, at a recent conference on the impact of the global economic crisis on women in Africa.

“Poverty has a female face and the global economic downturn will have a significant impact on women as more of them lose jobs and are forced to manage shrinking household incomes,” Ezekwesili said May 8 at the “Women and the Changing Global Outlook” conference organized by the British Embassy in Washington, and the National Geographic Society.

“The face of poverty is female,” she said, sketching the portrait of the typical poor African youth.

“She is 18.5 years old. She lives in a rural area. She has dropped out of school. She is single, but is about to be married or be given in marriage to a man approximately twice her age. She will be the mother of six or seven kids in another 20 years,” said Ezekwesili, citing the findings of the latest edition of the annual World Bank publication, Africa Development Indicators (ADI).

So many organizations donate clothing to America and other countries as well. By no means is this an issue, but what about the third world countries and continents that are in great need. One continent in particular is Africa. Shoes along with clothing protect us as a human race from deadly deceases, that some of us couldn't even imagine. The time is now, we need to make this world a better place for all.

I'm no longer asking and I now demanding that we as a human race come together and support the cause of giving back to those in great need. Walking The Roads, LLC goals is to provide shoes for every individual in great need. We as Americans take so many things for granted. Some time today I want you to stop what you are doing and think about how many shoes you have in your closet. Following that thought think about the individual who've never own a pair of shoes.

Africa: The Lost Continent

Home to one-sixth of the world's people, but contributing only one-fortieth of world GDP, Africa is the most conspicuous victim of the global recession. After a half-decade of 5 per cent growth, the continent's growth rate is expected to halve in 2009. Some countries, like Angola, are contracting. Elsewhere, the crisis has swept away the benefits of several years of economic reform. Many Africans will fall back into desperate poverty.

Development economists wring their hands in despair: Africa defies their best efforts to create a miracle. On the eve of decolonisation in 1960, real GDP per head in sub-Saharan Africa was almost three times higher than in Southeast Asia, and Africans were expected to live two years longer on average. In the 50 years since, African real GDP per head grew by 38 per cent and people lived nine years longer, while in Southeast Asia GDP per head grew by 1,000 per cent and people lived 32 years longer.

At first, the solution for Africa's under-development seemed obvious. Africa needed capital, but lacked savings. Therefore, money had to be provided from outside - by institutions like the World Bank. Since extracting commercial interest rates from starving people seemed like usury, the loans had to be offered on a concessionary basis - in effect, aid.

Throwing money at poverty became a panacea. It was easy to sell, and it appealed to people's humanitarian instincts. It also assuaged the guilt of colonialism, as with parents who give their children expensive gifts to make up for neglecting or mistreating them. But it did no good. Most aid was stolen or wasted. Despite the eight-fold increase in aid per head to the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1960 and 2007, real GDP per head decreased by two-thirds in the same period.

"Trade not Aid" became the new watchword. Spearheaded by the economist Peter Bauer in the 1980s, it became the nostrum of the Washington Consensus. Africa, it was fashionable to say, would catch up only if it deregulated its economies and embraced export-led growth like the "miracle" economies of East Asia. Advisers from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund told African governments to stop subsidising "national champions" and drop their trade barriers. Provision of a reduced volume of aid was to be conditioned on dismantling the public sector.

By 1996, only 1 per cent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa was civil servants, compared to 3 per cent in other developing regions and 7 per cent in the OECD. Yet despite the rollback of the state, Africa has not made the leap to prosperity. In a complete affront to economic theory, the little capital there is in Africa is fleeing the continent to be invested in already capital-rich societies.

The problem with Africa, economists then started to say, was that it lacked effective states. Many countries had "failed" states that could not provide even the minimum conditions of security and health. With 15 per cent of the world's population, sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 88 per cent of the world's conflict-related deaths and 65 per cent of AIDS victims. What historians have known for 2,000 years - and what the 18th century's classical economists also knew - suddenly struck the new breed of mathematical economists in the 1990s like a flash of lightning: prosperity depends on good government.

So how to get good government? Restoring or securing it conjures up the dreaded spectre of colonialism. After all, for all its other failings, colonialism provided the essential precondition of economic development: peace and security. The development discussion today is essentially about how such preconditions of poverty reduction and economic growth can be achieved without colonialism.

The most interesting contemporary contribution is by the Oxford economist Paul Collier. He argues that many African states have fallen into one or several development traps that are extremely difficult to escape. Moreover, once a country is mired in one of them, it is easy to fall into the next. Being poor makes you prone to conflict, and being in conflict makes you poor. So what hope is there for a poor country torn by civil war?
Citing the British mission to Sierra Leone, Collier argues for military intervention, when feasible, to secure peace. He supports international involvement to enforce post-conflict peace. But ongoing international assistance should be limited to providing voluntary good-governance templates.

Frameworks for how governments should make public spending transparent or how foreign resource-extracting companies should report their profits would make yardstick comparisons easier for local political activists, as well as providing a source of legitimacy for the government. The much-discussed Kimberly Process is a pilot project. Diamond companies volunteer not to buy from conflict areas in an attempt to prevent diamonds from funding warlords. This would be good for business, as affluent Western customers are now put off by the thought of buying blood-soaked jewellery.

Regional integration has featured prominently only in the last 50 years in Europe, but it has already resulted in a host of political and economic benefits to Europeans. Considerable evidence indicates that integration could be beneficial for Africa as well, given a framework suitable for African conditions.

This is a project worth supporting. Other efforts worthy of attention include formalising the huge informal economy in states such as Ghana. Typically, these are projects that employ international expertise under domestically issued mandates.

It is a sign of the poverty of development economics that proposals such as these are regarded as cutting edge. However, as long as there is a roadblock every 14 kilometres between Lagos and Abidjan - two of West Africa's leading cities - progress on the ground will be slow.

With refugees spilling over borders, pirates hijacking ships, and terrorists finding shelter, it is clear that, although Africa's solutions are its own, its problems are not. The rest of the world can no longer afford Africa's poverty. But the evidence of 50 years of failed efforts is that it hasn't a clue what to do about it.

It's Bigger than us, This is the future...

Shaken by Poverty in Africa

This Article was written by SHELI C. on Feb 25, 2004:

Over Christmas vacation I visited my family in South Africa, and was faced with true poverty for the first real time in my life. Apartheid was only being banned a mere ten years ago, and the immense differences between the social classes and life styles of the whites and blacks continue to persist in most areas of the country. While the majority of the white population lives in enormous houses with swimming pools and patios, most of the black homes are erected of scrap pieces of metal and wood, housing approximately eight people per shack. A third of South Africans carry the virus HIV, and almost all the victims are black.

Poverty was everywhere—Deven in the richest of the neighborhoods. We were constantly approached by beggars, and learned very quickly that giving to everyone would result in an empty wallet. I soon learned how to say no, and though it left me feeling quite guilty, I reminded myself that the few cents I was giving couldn't possibly be of much help to anyone. Though the scene was depressing, the feeling that it was out of my hands presided, and the realization that there was nothing I could do to help took hold of me.

While walking through a wealthy vacation town one day, my mother and I were approached by a young black boy carrying a bag of corn in each hand, a weight he struggled to lift. Putting them down, he cupped his hands, made a bowing motion towards us, and asked that we buy his corn for twenty rands a bag. His plea seemed urgent, and it was as if he was begging instead of selling. 20 rands are equivalent to approximately three dollars. Of course, we had no need for such a huge bag of corn, so we said no as we were now used to doing, and kept on walking.

From a fast food restaurant where my brother was buying a hot dog at nearly the same price, I watched the boy. He was approaching one person after another, all white, some of whom shook their heads politely; others merely waving him off like a fly. I thought of my 11-year-old brother who must have been around the same age. His life consists of TV and sports, and he has never had to work such a day in his life. He will never have to sell corn on the streets to support his family, and will never go to bed on an empty stomach. Yet, this boy has to do more than my brother ever will merely to survive.

I had never been shaken by poverty such as I was at that moment. That boy affected me more intensely than anyone had ever done before and suddenly I felt like giving him everything I owned. Instead, I walked over to him with a five rand coin, and not really knowing what I was doing, held it out and asked "Can I give this to you?" Cupping his hands to receive the coin, he looked up at me through the saddest eyes and gave the most beautiful smile I have ever seen. I will never forget it. I struggle to write this smile, as every time I attempt, I cross it out in fury. But I will tell you one thing: It came straight from his heart. For a moment, I believed I had just saved his life.

Five rands. That's about 80 cents. I thought about the smile a lot later. Five rands is nothing to me, and yet, in return for it, I received a smile that has truly changed my life. It might sound ridiculous that such a tiny incident could have such an impact on someone, but sometimes even the biggest things are triggered by something minute. This is when I realized that I can make a difference, and what I may consider small could mean the world to someone else. B'nai Tzedek allows me to donate $25 dollars a year to any cause I would like to support. ($25 is about 175 rands). If I was to give 175 rands to children like the one I met that day in South Africa, I would receive in return 35 similar smilesÐsmiles that change lives. A smile I would give anything to see again.

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UN Official Castigates Ethiopia on failure to achieve MDGs

According to the draft Health Service Development Plan (HSDP) joint UNDP and Ministry of Heath report of 2005, the per capita health service expenditure of Ethiopia is rated at 5.9 US dollars, the least among a list of other developing countries such as Kenya (31 USD), Uganda(18 USD), and Tanzania(8 USD). The report also indicated that in order to meet MDGs Ethiopia needs to increase the health service expenditure to 34 USD.

Despite various attempts at poverty reduction, maternal and child mortality rates still are high among sub- Sahara African countries and unemployment in urban areas is rife. Per capita health expenditure of the population is low.

Although Ethiopia has shown significant progress in primary education, it has yet to speed up the pace in order to attain the second of the MDGs, which is achievement of universal primary education.

According to the 2006 report of the United Nations, primary enrollment more than doubled from 22pc in 1990 to 47pc in 2004 due to large scale investments in government schools. However, the increase in enrollment needs to be matched by proportional increases in teaching staff and materials to guarantee adequate quality of education.

Where as the vision of MDGs was eradicating extreme poverty, improving health service, ensuring environmental sustainability, and developing global partnership; the eminent international and local market pressures are making the poor poorer than ever before and Ethiopians are part of them,” Salil told Fortune on March 24, at the Poverty Action Network Ethiopia (PANE), a civil society network in Ethiopia specialized in engaging civil society orgainsations in the poverty reduction process.

One of the commitments entered by developed countries in relation to MDGs is the relief of poor nations’ debts. Although some countries are canceling the debts of poor nations, the additional loans are causing the debts to pile up further.

“This in turn is practically prompting economic dependency of developing countries on the rich ones,” says Salil.

But Salil also believes that the loans, especially the grants advanced by developed nations, would support Ethiopia in its endeavor to meet the MDGs.

“To my knowledge, Ethiopia is enjoying more grants and loans from its bilateral and multilateral partners,” said the director.

Public relations officer of Ministry of Finance and Economic Development (MoFED) Getachew Admasu told Fortune that the 2007/2008 loan and grant totalled seven billion birr, out of which 3.84 billion Br is loan and the rest is grant. Where as the total loan and grant (5.6 billion Br) is received from multilateral institution such as International Development Association(IDA), European Union and United Nations Development Program(UNDP); 1.6 billion is obtained from bilateral development partners including Sweden, Ireland , S. Korea, Japan, China, India, and Netherlands.

The MoFED has devised a five years strategy-Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP)-which is the localized version of the MDGs expected to be achieved by 2015. After finalising the first five years if its strategic plan in 2005/2006, it currently is in its second five year strategic plan which will end by 2010/2011.

Salil joined the United Nations in October 2003, as Director of the Millennium Campaign. Prior to joining the UN, he was the Chief Executive of Action Aid, an international development NGO. An Indian National, Salil earned a distinction in Masters of Science in Social Policy and Planning from the London School of Economics and has a Masters in Business Administration from the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.

On his campaign trip, Salil visits Senegal and returns back to his office in New York.

MDGs were declared on September 2000 and adopted by the general assembly of United Nations 8th plenary meeting. It has eight goals that promote human development as the key to sustaining social and economic progress in all countries.

Extreme Poverty in Africa Drops

New York – Extreme poverty has begun falling in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the 2007 United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) mid-point progress report.
According to the report which was recently released by the United Nations Information Centre, extreme poverty in the region fell from 46.8 percent in 1990 to 41.1 percent in 2004, registering an effective decline of 5.7 percentage points.

The report noted that much of the progress was achieved since 2000. “The number of people living on less than one US dollar a day is also beginning to level off, despite rapid population growth,” the report said.

The per capita income of seven sub-Saharan countries also grew by more than 3.5 percent a year between 2000 and 2005 while 23 countries had growth rates of more than two percent a year over the period, thus providing a degree of optimism for the future, according to the report.

Worldwide, the number of people in developing countries living on less than one USD a day had fallen to 980 million in 2004, from 1.25 billion in 1990, the report said. The proportion of people living in extreme poverty also fell from nearly a third to 19 per cent over this period. “If progress continues, the MDG target will be met,” the report said.

The poverty gap ratio, which reflects the depth of poverty as well as its incidence, decreased in all regions except West Asia , where the rising poverty rate has caused the poverty gap to increase, and in transition countries in Europe and Commonwealth of Independent States where there has been marginal deterioration or no change.

However, despite all this improvement, the poverty gap ratio in sub-Saharan Africa remains the highest in the world, indicating that the poor in that region are the most economically disadvantaged in the world.

UN member states adopted eight MDGs in 2000, which was a first attempt by the international community to set time-bound targets for development, which are to be achieved by 2015.

Why Don’t We See Poverty Rates Converging?

Sub-Saharan Africa now has the highest incidence of extreme poverty, such as judged by the World Bank’s $1.25 a day poverty line. Granted, Africa has shown encouraging signs since the mid 1990s of reversing its past record of relatively poor performance against poverty. (The crisis has probably brought that progress to a halt this year, but the continent will hopefully be back on track in due course.) But the problem is that developing countries which start out with a high incidence of poverty, including many of those in Africa, typically do not enjoy a higher subsequent pace of poverty reduction. The overall incidence of poverty is falling in the developing world, but no faster in its poorest countries. We do not see “poverty convergence.”

That is puzzling if we accept two widely-held “stylized facts” about economic development, namely that there is an “advantage of backwardness”—higher growth rates in poorer countries—and that there is an “advantage of growth,” whereby a higher mean income tends to come with a lower incidence of absolute poverty. There is empirical support for both views, though with qualifications. The advantage of backwardness should mean that countries starting out with a high incidence of poverty and lower average incomes should see a higher subsequent growth rate and (hence) higher pace of poverty reduction.

In a new paper, “Why Don’t We See Poverty Convergence?,” I suggest a solution to this puzzle. When households face borrowing constraints, I find that a high initial level of poverty slows consumption growth for a given level of mean consumption. A high incidence of poverty also entails a lower subsequent rate of progress against poverty at any given growth rate (and poor countries tend to experience less steep increases in poverty during recessions).

Thus, for many poor countries, the growth advantage of starting out with a low mean income is lost due to a handicap associated with the high initial incidence of poverty. However, the same study finds that high current inequality (as found in many African countries) is only a handicap to growth and poverty reduction if it entails a high incidence of poverty relative to mean consumption.

This dynamic “disadvantage of poverty” appears to sit side-by-side with other factors impeding poverty reduction, such as human underdevelopment and policy distortions. Future research needs to better understand this important handicap faced by poor countries in their efforts to become less poor.

How have policies and institutions in low-income African countries fared?

Last Friday, the World Bank released its Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) of low-income countries. While the assessments are mainly used to determine the allocation of concessional IDA resources to poor countries, they can also provide a useful picture of the evolution of policies and institutions in Africa, as a recent note by my colleagues Delfin Go and Vijdan Korman shows. They find that:

Over the past eight years, African countries’ performance is about average compared with East Asia and South Asia.

Within Africa, Cape Verde, Tanzania, Uganda and Ghana have consistently had strong CPIA scores, while Zimbabwe, Comoros, Central African Republic and Eritrea seem to be stuck at the
low end of the scale.

Over the past five years, the biggest improvements in CPIA scores were registered by Ghana, Rwanda, Zambia and Mozambique, while Eritrea, Chad and Zimbabwe experienced the largest deterioration. Seven of Africa’s nine oil exporters (Angola and Nigeria were the exceptions) saw their CPIA scores decline.

For Africa as a whole, most of the improvement in policies and institutions was in the category called “economic management”—essentially macroeconomic and fiscal policies. The average scores on the other dimensions—structural policies, equity and social inclusion, and public management—stagnated. While some countries showed improvements along these other dimensions, an equal number of countries saw their scores go down.

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Shoes Aid in Preventing Debilitating Diseases

Wearing shoes helps prevent the spread of parasitic diseases that plague an estimated billion people worldwide, they are a basic human necessity. And the reality of life for many individuals in impoverished parts of Africa, Asia, and South America is that shoes are a rarity. It is not uncommon for children to grow up in these areas without ever having had a pair of new shoes - or any shoes at all.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that there are many hazards associated with going barefoot in contaminated sand, soil and dirty water, but the most obvious public health problem is hookworm disease.

Shoes also help prevent strongyloidiasis, podoconiosis and nonfililal elephanticisis. In many developing countries where stagnant water is a problem, these diseases are almost a condition of life. Parasites breed in such water, with females releasing 3,000 to 200,000 eggs per day depending on their type. Children sometimes swim in parasite-infested waters, and in the absence of suitable drinking water, people may be forced to drink it and use it for cooking purposes. Amongst the poorest of the poor, treatment for parasitic infections becomes a vicious cycle.

Once parasites enter the body, they often perforate the intestines, circulatory system, lungs, liver and other organs, and cause physical trauma. They can lump together in balls, and travel into and erode or block the brain, heart and lungs. On occasion, these lumps have been mistaken for cancerous tumors. Parasites also give off metabolic waste products that poison our bodies. Left untreated, the infections they cause can result in the loss of limbs, chronic illness and even death.Parasitic infections often prevent adults from being able to work and children from being able to attend school. The relationships between illness, access to education, and poverty have been well-documented by organizations such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Although most parasitic diseases are easily preventable, in the last 20 years or so, the fight against HIV/AIDS and malaria has captured public attention and resources resulting in their being overlooked, which is why they have earned the name “diseases of neglect.”

Poverty in Africa

Poverty is a state of not having enough money to take care of basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter. In other words it is a deficiency or deprivation. Poverty is a social problem that depends on the environment you find yourself in. For example poverty in Europe may not be poverty in Africa. This could be due to the level of development these continents have reached.
Africa is a continent known for its deep history and rich culture but is also known as a continent battling against poverty and disease. Most Africans in rural areas are engaged in either subsistence or commercial farming, but these people cannot be regarded as an average group of people because commercial farmers grow crops and rear animals for sale and so it makes them dependent on people to buy their farm produce.

Subsistence farmers grow crops and rear animals for sustenance of themselves and their families and while he might be able to provide food for his family he might not be able to provide other basic needs like shelter and clothing. Going into the causes of poverty in Africa: our African culture and beliefs have also driven some people to poverty. Take for example a culture that considers giving birth to many children as a sign of blessing from God. This belief could drive someone to poverty because with a large number of children it becomes a problem to cater for each of their needs. Also lack of education leads to poverty.

Some parents don’t see the importance of educating their children while some don’t have enough money to send their children to school. Such parents sometimes prefer sending their kids to hawk on the streets, an activity that doesn’t save them from their state of being poor. Natural disaster brings about poverty, for example the epidemic of bird flu that some time ago affected poultry; it affected not only poultry but also poultry farmers. These farmers lost income at that time because of the reduction in the consumption of poultry and those that were badly affected might have been driven into poverty. Aside from epidemics other natural disasters include floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes.

So also conflicts between and within countries cause poverty. This is so because lives and property will be lost and some people may lose the breadwinner of their family or property such as house and this may lead to poverty. In addition unemployment and laziness makes one limited in satisfying his needs which means poverty for such an individual. Furthermore poverty has its own effects on an individual and on society, which I will highlight below. Poverty leads to child labour which will expose the child to the dangers of being kidnapped, raped or other accidents.

It could also give an individual the idea of prostitution which exposes an individual to sexually transmitted diseases and loss of self-respect and dignity. Poverty leads to an increase in the crime rate such as armed robbery, making a fake of one’s documents, selling of hard drugs and this brings about discomfort to the society at large. Malnutrition is also a negative effect of poverty which could lead-to ill health. Having looked at the causes and negative effects of poverty, I would like to give some possible solutions to this social problem. Talking of a peaceful society, it is observed that work takes place, so also a stable society has a stable economy, that is to say that we Africans should try to resolve all disputes both within and outside our various countries.

Governments should provide free education at least at primary and secondary level; government should also encourage the uneducated ones through skills appreciation programs such as teaching them how to sew to make them more useful to themselves. Parents should be enlightened on why they should educate their children. We should look for a better way to tap our resources either by providing more machines or even talking to countries that can assist in this aspect. Small and medium scale companies should be encouraged to extract, process and produce our goods instead of exporting them for processing and buying them back at an expensive price.

Parents should be educated on the importance of family planning. International organisations can also partake in the reduction of poverty for example the United Nations, African Union among others. In conclusion, having discussed this social problem, it is left for us Africans to see to its alleviation.

We should all come together, drop all grudges and co-operate as brothers to help one another in our various deprived states. This could be achieved by forming our own international organisations like ECOWAS and the AU to help economically, socially, physically or in any other way possible. With this strategy in place, our continent will grow and poverty will gradually be eliminated.

THE POSSIBLE WAYS TO END POVERTY IN AFRICA

Allocate resources fairly. Anti-corruption and sound public administrative policies should be a made a priority. Corruption is by far one of the leading causes of poverty in Africa. The elite and those in power should not be the only beneficiaries of public resources and funds, while the poor perish.

Related with the above, the budget allocation process should focus on areas that help end poverty. For instance, if agriculture employs more people than other sectors, then a substantial size of the budget should go to this sector.

Reduce dependency on foreign aid. Mechanisms should be put in place to promote self growth, other than waiting for the donors to provide for us. Countries should provide opportunities to the poor to encourage them earn and develop on their own, without opening their hands to the beggars. This can be in the form of training, extension services and micro-finance provision. Small scale entrepreneurs should be encouraged to set up and expand.
Encourage infrastructure development in all regions.

Better roads, schools, electricity, health facilities etc, are strong catalysts in development and poverty alleviation. And if well distributed can lead to easy access to markets as well as attract development in areas that would otherwise remain without. This will also help reduce the production costs and thus more net income in the long run. The tendency for most African countries is to focus their development only in urban centers, yet majority of the poor live in rural areas.