Madeleine Wackernagel
The United Nations Human Development Report 1997, released this week, highlights the importance of integrating poverty reduction into economic policies. Only those countries that make “poverty eradication a central objective of their national development policies” will achieve steady and equitable growth in the next century.
“The positive and negative experiences over the past 50 years are instructive,” says Richard Jolly, special adviser to the UN Development Programme (UNDP), administrator and principal co-ordinator of the report.
“Strategies to eradicate poverty are not only key to advancing human development but have proven essential to economic growth policies.”
Poverty has many faces and the UNDP has this year introduced a Human Poverty Index (HPI), which looks at whether people in the developing world have the basic choices and opportunities to lead a long and healthy life and to enjoy a decent standard of living.
The HPI measures the percentage of the population expected to survive to age 40; the percentage of illiterates; and lack of access to healthcare, safe water and reasonable nutrition.
Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba, Chile, Singapore and Costa Rica score highest, having reduced human poverty to less than 10% of their population. On the lowest rankings, where human poverty exceeds 50%, six out of the bottom seven countries are in Africa: Niger, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Mali, Cambodia and Mozambique.
Indeed, while great strides have been made in reducing poverty worldwide, most notably in China, sub-Saharan Africa has the greatest incidence of human poverty – and the most rapid growth in human poverty.
Nonetheless, the UNDP believes extreme poverty could be eradicated over the next 20 years, as long as countries implement policies that are “pro-poor”. This would entail addressing structural inequalities in the distribution of assets, such as land, housing and social services; institutional and policy reforms to promote better access and greater security of tenure for women and greater support for agricultural productivity, promoting micro- enterprises and the informal sector, as well as labour-intensive manufacturing.