Poverty and human development

  Born in 2000, Nthabiseng is black, the daughter of a poor family from a rural area of East Cape province, some 700 kilometres from Cape Town. Her mother never went to school. The likelihood of her dying in the first year of her life was 7.2% and her life expectancy fails to go much beyond 50. It is unlikely she will have access to safe drinking water nor to sanitation services while she is growing up.

  Amy was born the same day in a remote town in south-east Kentucky, in the United States. She lives with her parents in a broken-down caravan and runs barefoot around the dirty unkempt grounds. They do not have a telephone. To get drinking water they must go to faucets some distance away, but they can watch television on an old set and Amy can go to school. Amy’s father lost his job when the factory closed down. He now does odd-jobs but the pay is very low and social welfare programmes are so niggardly that the family has dropped below the poverty line.

  Poverty takes on many faces. It is not only a curse in the Third World. In the developed countries, situations may not be as dramatic as those we find in developing economies, thanks to the higher general level of wealth and existing social welfare systems. But what is shocking is that the problem remains in our consumer societies of abundance. This is a moral question but also one of economics. Poverty and social exclusion represent a waste of human potential and a drag on the economy, growth and prosperity of a country.

  The term «social exclusion» is often used to describe those situations where an individual has serious difficulties or is unable to have access to normal systems of personal development and full involvement in the community. In any case, social exclusion and poverty are closely related and affect large groups of people. More than 70 million Europeans, including more than 8 million Spaniards, are at risk of poverty. Those most commonly vulnerable are women, the elderly, males who have lost a job, and so on.

  What is to be done? World Bank studies show that the spread of economic development since the Eighties has brought about a decrease in the proportion of the world population in a state of extreme poverty. Large countries such as India and China have fully moved into the group of world countries managing to reduce the segment of the population caught into extreme poverty. The opening up of world trade in itself guarantees nothing but it often goes hand in hand with improvements in production capacity and the development of peoples. Direct development aid relieves difficult situations but only in a few cases does it manage to resolve the basic problem.

  Apart from having more or less generous social welfare systems, the developed economies apply a broad range of policies aimed at easing the most extreme situations. The development of initiatives, such as micro-credits and increased activity of non-governmental organizations and foundations aimed at improving the Welfare State, the outcome of a growing ethical awareness among companies and ordinary citizens, should serve as an incentive to carry on the fight against one of the main curses of humanity.

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