The goal is clear; to end poverty and to do that we most begin by answering the question of why poor people are poor, belief about the poor and the underlying causes of poverty, determine the action that development practitioners persue, the policies that national politicians devise, and the action that we as concern citizins take. belief about the nature of poverty can motivate action or rationalise inaction.
This piece of work perhaps throws more light in an attempt to provide answer to these questions. The term poverty implies to those individuals whose incomes are considered inadequate to meet basic needs. The oxford popular dictionary defines poverty as a state of being poor; that is characterise by scarcity, lack and inferiority, where people has little money or means. In real terms poverty is characterised by high mortality rate of infants, malnutrition in thousand of children, age people eating dog food in order to survive, it also means illiteracy and ignorance, disease, misery and stunting of human life and potentials, hunger and starvation. There is always a question; how do we determine if some one is poor?
According to IAN Robertson (1983), there are two ways of defining poverty. In terms of absolute deprivation, that is, lack of basic necessities or in term of relative deprivation, that is, the inability to maintain the living standard customary in the society.
Absolute Deprivation: this is a situation in which people can not afford the basic needs, that is, standards of health care, nourishment, housing, and clothing (kola 1962). This definition is commonly used. In the United State of America, the labour department state that, the average family of four would need 11546 Dollars to maintain a lower living standard; and 1981, medium family income for the Nation was 22388 Dollars. This level of income is determined by calculating the cost of adequate nutrition under emergency or temporary conditions. There is naturally some debate about exactly what this level is: Rural families for instance are expected to live on lower income because their cost of living is comparatively low, that is, housing is less expensive and they can grow some of their own food. Where as in urban area or cities people are expected to live on higher income because housing is more expensive and they depend on the rural area for their food. This makes the cost of living in urban towns and cities very high.
Relative Deprivation: this situation refers to when people may be able to afford basic necessities but are unable to maintain the standards of living considered normal for society. In some ways this definition is more realistic. One for instance, electricity way not be absolute necessity in the home because most people in the world get by without it. But it is thought to be a necessity and not a luxury in our society. Under this definition the poor are arbitrarily defined as some proportion of the lowest income earners in the society, often the bottom fifth or tenth. This poverty is then measured not in terms of how their incomes compares with the poverty line, but rather in terms of how their income compares with those of the rest of society. This approach assumes that poverty can not be eliminated as long as significant economic inequalities persist
CAUSES OF POVERTY IN AFRICA
The standard diagnosis of Africa is that the continent is suffering from governance crises, marked by corruption, poor economic policy choices, and denial of human right. With highly visible example of poor governance, as in Zimbabwe, widespread war and violence as in Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. Jean Marc Ela (1980) noted that, “Africa is also sick of itself,» one need only mention of the organised blundering by the ruling class who as in Cameroon for example make corruption a system of government. But it is wrong, many parts of Africa are well governed, and yet even the relatively well governed countries remain in poverty. Governance is an issue but African development challenges are deeper. Indeed, using World Bank indicator, there is no evidence that Africa’s governance on average is worse than elsewhere once we control for Africa’s low income. Controlling for income is necessary in evaluating governance, since good governance requires for wages, training, information system and so forth, and thus improves systematically with income level.
Some anthropologists are going back to the old litanies of ‘cultural obstacle to development.’ More crudely, some go back to the climate theory to explain Africa’s ‘backwardness’ or ‘helplessness.’ Other, with the spectre of Malthusian haunting international financial institution go so far to blame the poor themselves for having too many children. By taking account of the interaction between population, development, and the environment, the neo-liberal debate on the African economic crises also resort to the ‘regressive spiral’ theory of poverty which links population growth to environmental degradation.
To understand why Sub-Saharan African is the region with the greatest investment need, five structural reasons are stress that makes it the most vulnerable region of the world to a persistent poverty trap;
v Very high transport cost and small markets.
v Low productive agriculture.
v Very high disease burden.
v History of adverse geopolitics, and
v Very low diffusion of technology from abroad.
Some causes related to failures of development projects
v Exteriority of project, that is, insufficient environmental approach which does not takes into consideration the realities of the milieu, and application of inadequate development models which is evident of the lack of adequate knowledge about the real conditions of the environment.
v Isolation of project in relation to, the national economy, the environment and limited time.
v Inflexibility and rigidity of project arising from non submission of models of project to the funding agencies, and also, initiators of the projects not taking into consideration changes in the agrarian systems, and insufficiency of staffs of the project.
v At times most poverty reduction strategies of countries are not up to the task of meeting the task. In order to measure if they are up to the task, various questions are being raised to measure it. Are the targets aligning with the task? Is the poverty reduction strategy aligning with the goals? Are the targets substantiated with solid analysis of the needed input? Is the strategy grounded in a long-term assessment of needs? And, is the budget consistent with the level of inputs needed to achieve these goals?
How close can African countries overcome poverty?
A four step approach has been recommended;
v First, countries need to map the key dimension and underlying dynamics of extreme poverty by region, locality and gender, as best as possible with available data.
v Second, consistent with the poverty map, countries should undertake a need assessment to identify the specific public investments necessary to achieve the goals.
v Third, the need assessment should be converted into a 10years framework for action, including public investments, public management and financing.
v Forth, 3 to 5 years base poverty reduction should be elaborated within the 10years framework, with a key focus on transparency, accountability, human right, and benchmarking and result base management.
