Poverty and Inequality

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

A phobia is an irrational fear of something. We all suffer from phobias of some kind. My worst phobia is arachnophobia, which is one of the reasons I love living in the (almost) safe haven of La Paz. Instead of trying to confront and overcome my irrational fear, I chose to run away. If I hadn’t found La Paz, I would probably be working as a scientist in Antarctica (which still sounds like a very attractive option to me).

So, although some of my friends consider me excessively rational, I can understand and empathise with people who suffer from irrational fears. Our brains are far from being rational, and are still dominated by emotions that were useful during our evolution over the last several hundred thousand years.

One of those emotions that were useful in our evolutionary past is xenophobia: a deep-rooted fear of foreigners. For most of our evolutionary history, it is quite likely that strangers were very bad news indeed, so this instinct made a lot of sense.

The xenophobia instinct is still very much with us, but it makes little sense anymore in this globalized, integrated, and relatively civilized world. Most foreigners you might meet probably want to work for you, trade with you, or help you in some other ways. Less than one in a million is out to kill you. Your benefit from interacting with foreigners outweigh the risks many thousand times. So it is indeed an irrational fear now.

Anna Rosling (photographer; co-founder of Gapminder; one of Bill Gates’ Heroes in the Field; and daughter-in-law of my biggest hero ever) has made a really nice attempt to alleviate our irrational fear of foreigners, in a safe and comfortable way, with her Dollar Street project. The project visited 264 families in 50 countries and collected 30,000 photos in order to show us normal life for normal families in many different dimension of ordinary life. This, of course, is in sharp contrast to the regular news we receive, which always show us the extremes, and thus give us a completely distorted image of the world. Her point is that people from other countries and cultures are not nearly as strange as they seem to us in the news.

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By: Lykke E. Andersen*

Two of the Sustainable Development Goals recently agreed by all the member states of United Nations are to reduce poverty and to reduce inequality, and for those goals to be realized, the incomes of the poorest 40% of the population have to increase. Designing policies to reduce poverty and inequality at the very least requires us to know where to find the target population. In this blog I will argue that they are probably not where you think they would be. Read More »

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

Even the most affluent and powerful people in the World are exposed to the risk of adverse shocks and stresses: Christopher Reeve (Superman) became a quadriplegic after a riding accident; Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years; Mel Gibson had to pay more than $400 million in his divorce settlement; Steve Jobs got fired from his own company; and Donald trump has declared bankruptcy four times.

We are all at risk of adversity, or even calamity, and the list of threats is endless: Natural disasters, illness, accidents, unemployment, price fluctuations, conflict, vandalism, fire, robbery, pest attacks, technological change, pollution, climate change, etc. Most of these threats are almost entirely outside our control and it is important that we build up resilience against them so that we will be able to overcome the challenges that we are bound to encounter.

Some people and households are more resilient than others, however. They bounce back even after severe adversity. Nelson Mandela, for example, became one of the most famous and respected presidents in the World and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after spending 27 years in prison; Christopher Reeve claimed that the accident, which left him paralyzed from the neck down, helped him appreciate life more and considered himself a very lucky man less paralyzed than many able-bodied men; and Donald Trump evidently rebuilt his fortune between bankruptcies.

While resilience is an integral part of the human psychology, it would be useful if we could measure and compare resilience in a more general way. This is what a new research paper and Policy Brief from INESAD proposes.

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By Lucia Cuno

UNICEF estimates that the total number of street children in the world runs into the tens of millions. A study by Toybox, a Christian charity committed to helping street children in Latin America, found that in Bolivia there are over 2,500 children living on the streets in major cities such as La Paz, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz; that 20 percent of them had left home because there wasn’t enough food, 20 percent were abandoned, and 60 percent had been abused; that most street children are illiterate because they left school; and that 90 percent use solvents as a form of escapism.

Meanwhile, these children have legal rights that are supported by the Bolivian constitution, but which are not realized in the real world. This injustice is the reason for the existence of Kaya Children International.

Kaya is a small, grassroots, non-profit institution located in La Paz. It was originally called the Bolivian Street Children Project, and was founded in 1997 by Dr. Chi Huang, who at the time was training to be a doctor in Boston, U.S.A. with sponsorship from the Park Street Church of Boston. The organization seeks to promote the development and protection of, and to restore the fundamental rights of, children and adolescents who live on the street, are in high-risk situations, or are the victims of violence or abandonment. The first home opened in 2001 as an initiative of the Park Street Church; over the next years the project grew and became an independent non-profit organization. The leaders realized that the next stage of growth was not to just build more homes, but to engage in preventative interventions to enable families to raise their own children in a better way. In 2008, to mark this stage of development, the organization was renamed to Kaya Children International. Read More »

Social movements generate a lot of excitement. Many people see them as the most legitimate way of enacting change in society, as they are “from below”, from the people themselves, more ‘inclusive’ and ‘democratic’. Movements that have come around since the 1960s differ from older styles of public pressure where the voice of the poor and the oppressed was expressed through leaders in trade unions or political parties. Examples of the “New Social Movements” in contemporary Latin America include the indigenous movement EZLN (Exército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) in Mexico and the landless workers movement in Brazil, the MST (Movimento Sem Terra). But how truly democratic and inclusive these new movements are is rarely a serious research question, but a mere assumption by scholars and supporters who fall in love with the idea of movements from below.

For almost 20 years, Dr. Judy Hellman, professor of Political Science and Social Sciences at York University, Canada, has written critically about the largely uncritical worship of new social movements that seems to have swept the world. She spoke to Development Roast about her once controversial views (which are increasingly becoming common wisdom) and the past and future of research on social movements in Latin America:

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The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set to reduce by half the number of people without access to clean water by 2015 as target ten of goal number seven: ensure environmental sustainability. And—although this fact remains controversial*—this target was met three years early in March 2012. However, this is not a cause for complacency since, according to the 2012 report by the Joint Monitoring Program—the body that carries out MDGs target assessments—780 million people are still at the back of the queue for access to clean water. In the future, improving access to water for the remaining three quarters of a million people without it will need to become a bigger, more crosscutting priority because it has much more to offer than environmental sustainability. Read More »

As shown in our post “Is there more to life than money? Mapping happiness of people and planet”, several attempts have been made to measure happiness and wellbeing globally. However, consensus proved elusive since different studies brought very diverse results. That is because happiness is a very hard thing to define – if it had a clear, objective definition, our lives would be a lot easier, wouldn’t they? Still, there are several working definitions, and most of them can be grouped in either of the following two categories. On one hand, there is a happiness that relates to one’s satisfaction with their lives. That often involves a feeling of having achieved one’s goals in life, having an option not to work in an extremely degrading job, having good relationships, etc. On the other hand, there is a more emotional happiness. That is much more momentary, it is the “state of mind of feeling good”. According to the latter definition, one’s happiness would be measured by how often, how intensely, and for how long one “feels good”.  Read More »

By Erin Taylor

What is the psychology of poverty? This question has been a contentious one in anthropology, particularly during the last half a century. In La Vida (1966), a study of poor Puerto Rican families, Oscar Lewis argued that poverty produces certain psychological traits and social behaviours that become enculturated. His ideas caused an uproar because they were widely interpreted to imply that so-called poor people are not capable of escaping poverty. Critics lamented that his book was being misappropriated by the U.S. Government to implement paternalistic, “blame the victim” policies among poor African-American communities that stripped them of their agency, treating them like hopeless cases that needed to be disciplined rather than assisted.

Since then, a plethora of research in poor communities around the world has overturned the idea of a global culture of poverty. Read More »

So far this month the Development Roast blog has published articles about being poor but not feeling poor, challenges of identifying the poor and consumerism to hide poverty.  All of which highlight the loose and ever changing perception that people have of poverty.

As a result, the topic of pro-poor development often sparks lengthy debates when raised, since without a specific definition of what poverty is and what it is not, people differ in their views of how to relieve people of this intangible concept. This is especially the case when supposedly very poor people actively choose their lifestyle over one that offers financial gains through entering the world markets, a phenomenon that is largely attributed to poor people’s assumption that certain financial improvements would threaten their community lifestyle, which in the end is what they prize above all else.Real poverty, rather than just being poor, can be defined in terms of food insecurity: if you cannot provide food for yourself and your family due to physical or circumstantial restrictions to sufficient finances or fertile land, then you are living in poverty. Read More »

I used to think that giving aid was easy. You just find those in need and give them money, incentives or beneficial programs, right? It turns out that even the seemingly simple initial process of identifying the poor is not as easy as it sounds. Not only has a truly efficient method of identifying those living in poverty yet to be established, but there are discrepancies between community satisfaction with known methods and the method’s official success rate.

The main challenge that is faced by researchers and potential benefactors in developing countries when identifying poor people is a lack of reliable income data. Many of the poorest people work informally and/or inconsistently, with few or no verifiable income records. Considerable and creative efforts therefore need to be made to identify intended beneficiaries if aid money is not to be misdirected toward wealthier households.

To date, Proxy Means Tests (PMTs) have proved the most accurate method of identifying families living on USD$2 or less a day. Read More »