Removal of poverty: need for better understanding

There is growing interest among multilateral and bilateral organizations in formulating development assistance schemes to remove poverty. The Asian Development Bank, for instance, has developed clear-cut criteria that will be used as a screen for evaluating if it should finance specific projects or not. The World Bank, of course, has been emphasizing poverty removal as a major objective of its activities, as have other organizations such as the Canadian International Development Agency and the Department for International Development. Understanding poverty is not a simple matter, because even the definition of who is poor is not without several complex factors, some of which could be contradictory in nature. Prof. Amartya Sen and other researchers have in recent years made major contributions to our understanding of poverty. Clearly, a simple but powerful definition of poverty is one where human beings are unable to exercise and retain control over their living conditions. In the context of natural resources, the damage and degradation that take place in the environment and these resources that provide sustenance to the poor essentially condemn them to eternal poverty. Regeneration of the natural resource wealth on which a community depends is, therefore, an essential prerequisite for the elimination of poverty. Consequently, for a community or society to acquire the capacity to maintain a satisfactory part of its natural resource endowment is an important factor in liberating it from the vicious circle that they are victims of. Indeed, one definition of sustainability is that it should incorporate the means to sustainability. Given the complexities of the factors underlying poverty and the temptation of those responsible for financial decisions to accept simple approaches and answers, it is essential for staff in these organizations to themselves acquire capacity to understand this complex human condition. Or else the danger is that large sums of money, effort, and other resources would be expended in a noble cause only to learn five years later that little, if anything, has actually been achieved.