Alleviating Poverty/Advancing Prosperity: An Essential Guide for Helping the Poor

By Steven Downey

Alleviating Poverty/Advancing Prosperity explores the current state of our fight against world poverty in an effort to rethink our strategies and the nature of poverty itself. The principles explored in this book will increase the effectiveness of overseas antipoverty programs. They will help improve sustainability, and help take development projects to scale sufficient to address this worldwide challenge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483556864

Book preview

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Introduction

Water, Water Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink

I watched the rainfall as I stood in the doorway of a plain wooden structure in the Shuar village of Katsutka. I had traveled with one fellow American and two Ecuadorians to the rain forest of eastern Ecuador, and we were experiencing another daily downpour. The huge raindrops made a thunderous sound on the corrugated tin roof. It rained like crazy every afternoon while we were there, and buckets of water ran off the roof in the middle of July, which was considered the dry season.

The village had developed a spring for their water source that was located a thirty-minute walk away, uphill through the jungle. We were visiting this community at the end of the dry season, and the spring was barely yielding enough water to produce any output from a PVC pipeline that was intended to deliver water downhill to the village. We often saw children sucking feverishly on the end of the black plastic tubing trying to syphon water from where the output of the spring normally flowed freely. Now there was just a trickle, and the people in the village lamented their seasonal shortage of drinking water. I thought about this as I watched thousands of gallons of rainwater flow off the roof of our bunkhouse to be reclaimed by the jungle. I wondered, How could this possibly be? How could a community in the rain forest be experiencing a shortage of drinking water?

After my experience in Katsutka, I set out to further educate myself on the subject of community development, and to become more involved in water resource development and water treatment projects. I developed a website, A Layman’s Guide to Clean Water, www.clean-water-for-laymen.com, for the purpose of educating myself on everything having to do with community water resources and for disseminating the information I was learning.¹

I never again wanted to be in the position of not having any answers, suggestions, or ideas when confronted with drinking water issues overseas, and I wanted to share my newfound knowledge with others. I have since been involved in projects intended to help the poor in places like Uruguay, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Brazil, and Mexico. Some were water resource development projects. Some were agricultural projects. Some were simply humanitarian efforts designed to solve a specific problem for a period of time. Some efforts were spiritual in nature, intended to provide support and encouragement. I wish I could say that I was always effective and successful at alleviating the suffering of the poor and making their lives better and more prosperous. This is not the case. There have been a lot of trials and a lot of errors made.

It has been my passion and my privilege to be involved in the lives of the poor and to experience, observe, and fellowship with the poor and to hear their stories. It is my hope that my experiences and observations can benefit others, and at least generate some discussion.

Poverty alleviation is no small task. Addressing the big questions about world poverty is truly daunting. Questions like: why are there so many poor, why are some regions poorer than others, how can we change the fortunes of billions of people, are simply not easily grasped. People or organizations that work with the poor are therefore often limited in the scope and the effectiveness of their efforts. Most poverty alleviation efforts focus on the symptoms of poverty and not the causes themselves. It is simply not possible for one organization or one sector of society to fully address worldwide poverty. No one entity or person is up to the task.

Every entity, every method (i.e., charity, nonprofits, governments, religion, private enterprise) has its strengths and its weaknesses. Each has a role to play, and each utilizes materials, approaches, methods, and philosophies that are successful to some extent that the rest of us can learn from.

As Brian Smith, President, Latin America Group of The Coca-Cola Company said in an interview with Shared Value Initiative regarding corporate social responsibility:

When each partner across what we like to call the golden triangle of business, civil society and government brings their core capabilities and strengths to bear, we magnify our impact exponentially.²

The many causes of poverty require a multitude of solutions. This means that a variety of different poverty-fighting organizations are needed, each using a mix of poverty-fighting strategies. It will take the involvement and cooperation of everyone concerned, all of us working together, to make a dent in alleviating poverty.

This book was written for people who work with or desire to work with the poor. This includes individuals and organizations operating both domestically and overseas. It includes nonprofits, both secular and faith-based, their directors and staff, both paid and volunteer. It includes private business owners and social entrepreneurs seeking to have a social impact. It also includes Christian missionaries and college students, or anyone who has a heart for the poor, a desire to help others, and a dream of making a difference around the world.

By working together, being open to understanding and accepting the contributions of all players, and by adopting some possibly unfamiliar strategies, we can more closely approach real success toward alleviating world poverty. We must assure that plans and projects intended to help the poor:

Do more good than harm

Help as many people as possible

Include everyone in the solution

Create change that lasts

Chapter 1

Alleviating Poverty: Perceptions Matter

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

—Mother Teresa¹

As you begin reading this book, if you are tempted to skip ahead to the chapters that interest you, or rush to the section of practical solutions, I encourage you to stay on course and read the chapters in order. Each chapter contains important concepts that are intended to give some of you brand-new insights. Some of these new discoveries may be essential to your understanding poverty, improving the effectiveness of your organization or your personal vision for reaching the poor. The solutions I discuss later are based on the assumption that you understand the principals laid out earlier in the book.

Maybe you are new to the field of international development with a goal of poverty alleviation. Maybe you are a college student with a vision or goal of making a difference in the world. This book was written for you. If you are a government official involved in anti-poverty programs or who routinely interacts with and facilitates the activities of nonprofits and others who are working to improve the lives of the poor, it was written with you in mind. If you are working now to help alleviate poverty or facilitate development overseas as the director or responsible authority of a secular or faith-based nonprofit, I wrote this book for you. I wrote this book for you if you are a missionary overseas working in poor communities. If you run a private business that understands the potential that exists in the private sector to help the poor and to promote social responsibility, this book is for you, as well.

You will see the word development used throughout this book. I use this term to describe the process used by governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and others to achieve the goal of poverty alleviation around the world. It is the process of economic and social transformation that is based on complex cultural and environmental factors and their interactions that has the goal and potential to positively influence the lives of individuals, families, and communities.²

The word development can also be used to describe the activities that some countries carry out to build up infrastructure in a foreign country with the aim of gaining access to that country’s resources. The benefits of this kind of development often bypass the poor, and this is not the kind of development we are talking about in this book.

The causes of poverty we see in America and around the world are as numerous as the poor themselves. They are worthy of consideration. They are wide-ranging, and they are persistent. None of us can fully address all the causes. If readers get nothing else from this book, it is important that they understand two very important points.

Key Point #1 - When it comes to alleviating poverty worldwide, it is impossible for any one organization, or one sector of society, to do everything.

Key Point #2 – We cannot afford to carry out our work in isolation. We must work together. We must be open to adopting successful philosophies, strategies, and methods, found in other individuals and organizations that may be quite dissimilar to ours in their problem solving approach or in their mission statement.

Understand that much of the material in this book reflects the ideas of many authors and experts in the field of poverty alleviation. My hope is that this book will offer many of you access to their principles and tools as you think about your strategies for helping the poor. Some of the definitions and information included in each chapter are discussed for the benefit of beginners joining the fight against worldwide poverty. Other concepts may challenge the veterans, as well. It is my hope that the following pages will present you with a broader perspective. Let’s walk through this together, and maybe we will find some new ways to approach the problem of poverty.

Let’s face it, we live in a messed-up world. Factors that contribute to poverty come from many places. They include unemployment, climate, geography, politics, trade, corruption, and war. A condition of poverty may also stem from a lack of education or a lack of health care or problems with supply, distribution, scarcity, or social