Today marks the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. I am currently in Indonesia, a country which – despite its many natural and cutural riches and an affluent upper- and middleclas - has nearly half its population living under the poverty line on less than $2 a day. Even though the government has been allocating increasing funds to poverty eradication (from Rp 41 trillion ($4.3 billions) in 2006 to Rp 66.2 trillion this year, the results have been disappointing with no significant improvements to be observed and no chance of meeting the MDG (Millenium Development Goals) by 2015.
The Jakarta Post quotes Trihardi Saptoadi, the director of World Vision Indonesia:
the governments programs to eradicate poverty have either missed their targets or have been ineffective.
The fact that more money spend doesn’t mean that programs and policies be more effective, is one voiced by many critics of the conventional aid regime.
Half The Sky
Fortunately in recent years we have seen more rigorous and empirically based studies about the workings and failures of aid programs. Many of these are mentioned in Half The Sky, the new book by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.
In the words of the authors:
Half the Sky lays out an agenda for the world’s women and three major abuses: sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence including honor killings and mass rape; maternal mortality, which needlessly claims one woman a minute. We know there are many worthy causes competing for attention in the world. We focus on this one because this kind of oppression feels transcendent – and so does the opportunity. Outsiders can truly make a difference.
So let us be clear up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women’s power as economic catalysts.
The Girl Effect
It’s a read I highly recommend, a compelling mix of highly emotional individual life stories, both of female suffering and female agency, academic analysis and concrete policy recommandations.
One of Kristofs and WuDunns main claims is that it makes sense for anti-poverty programs to focus on girls and women. It is an impolitic secret of global poverty, they write that:
some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes, but also by unwise spending – by men. It is not uncommon to stumble across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a 5$ mosquito bed net and than find the child’s father at a bar, where he spends $5 each week. Several studies suggest that when women gain control over spending, less family money is devoted to instant gratifycation and more for education and starting small businesses. …“
MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo found out that the worlds poorest families typically spend approx. 10 times as much (an average of 20% of their income) on a combination of alcohol, prostitutes, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts as they do on educating their children.
… if poor people spent only as much on educating their children as they do on beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor children. Girls, since they are the ones kept home from school now, would be the biggest beneficiaries.
One of the simplest solutions to end poverty would thus be to reallocate spending. This is evidenced in many studies: for example, Esther Duflo looked at the capital allocation of men and women in Ivory Coast. Here, men crow coffee, cocao and pineapple, whereas women grow plaintains, bananas, coconuts and vegetables. Some years the „men’s crops“ have good harvests, in others it is the women who prosper. When the men’s crops flourish, the household spends more money on alcohol and tobacco. When the women have the money, the household spends more money on food, particularly beef. Other studies suggest that women are more likely to invest in education and small businesses. Duflo: „When women command greater power, child health and nutrition improves.“
Micro-lending and lobbying for legal change
The aid industry can do a whole lot of things to empower women economically, for example rolling out micro-landing programs targeting women. But often the change has to be on a higher level, as in the many countries where women still are not allowed to own land or inherit from their husbands (instead the inheritance usually goes to the brother of the deceased). Here aid-giving Western governments can tie money to legal reform: thus when the small South African kingdom of Lesotho applied for Millenium Challenge Money, the US pushed Lesotho to change a law according to which women were not allowed to buy land or borrow money without a husbands permission. In its eagerness to get the funding it did so.
One thing I find very compelling about Half The Sky is that Kristof and WuDunn don’t make the fight against poverty sound easy. Instead they present it as a hard road, full of trial and error, often working in a highly irrational way and prone to many unforeseeable turns. This realism combined with a forcefull belief that we can make a difference in the lives of the poor and that one of the most promising ways is by focussing on girls and women, seems to me the right approach.