Academics have been involved in development and poverty issues in poor countries since at least the 1940s. Most academics and practitioners who work professionally in the world of development engage in the field not as dispassionate observers but with the explicit intention of trying to rid the world of extreme poverty. But we are now witnessing something new. For a number of years, a small band of academics from other fields, perhaps most notably from the disciplines of ethics and political and moral philosophy, have been interested in and have tried to promote a wider interest in “development ethics.”Footnote 1 More recently, their numbers have been swelled by an ever-larger group of academics from these disciplines who are convinced of the moral obligation to respond to the problem of world poverty and are driven by the need to do more. The engagement of any individual or group concerned with quickening the end of extreme poverty is clearly both welcome and encouraging. However, before moving too quickly to promote new attempts to eradicate poverty, it is necessary to examine carefully the work that academics and development professionals have done and are currently doing in this area, the way that this work has been and is being used by policy-makers, and how these same academics understand and analyze the impact of their work, including their understanding of why they have not been more successful. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the debate and discussion about how concerned academics and individuals might add particular value to the work already being done.
This essay is divided into three parts. In the following section I attempt to extract from the work of academics, researchers, and policy-makers in the “world of development” what we know and have learned about how best to accelerate the process of reducing extreme poverty, including what does not work. Against this backdrop, the next section discusses different ways that academics from outside the professional development community might effectively contribute to the faster or more effective eradication of global poverty. It considers in particular some current knowledge gaps in the development field that might be bridged by academics from the fields of moral and political philosophy, building on work that is already being done, some of which has not been sufficiently noticed by development practitioners. Finally, I discuss briefly the types of antipoverty organizations that concerned individuals might support, and include a checklist of questions to help assess their approaches, strengths, and weaknesses.
What Do We Know and What Have We Learned?
Defining Poverty
The first stage in eradicating extreme poverty is to ensure we agree on precisely what poverty is—how it is manifested and its key characteristics. To the outsider, it may come as a surprise (even shock) to discover that today scholars remain divided about how extreme or absolute poverty should be defined and how it can best be assessed and measured. New definitions of poverty and new approaches to assessing it are still presented, supported, and challenged; and new global assessments of poverty are still being rolled out, the most recent being the Multidimensional Poverty Index in 2010.Footnote 2
Many outside the development profession equate poverty simply with low income: those living on less than $1.25 (previously $1) a day are said to be living in extreme poverty, and the aim of those concerned with the eradication of poverty is to lower the number living below such income levels as quickly as possible. The fact that two different measures of poverty—$1 or $1.25 a day for “extreme poverty” and $2 a day for “moderate poverty”—are now widely used in mainstream discussions of poverty is an indication not merely that there are differing views on what people need in order not to be assessed as being extremely poor but that it is not so easy to measure in monetary terms precisely what they need.Footnote 3 Perhaps of more importance than the lack of agreement over what income levels to use in determining who is poor is the almost unanimous agreement within the development profession that poverty is multidimensional—that is, it is composed of a number of different elements and cannot (and therefore should not) be explained or measured by one attribute only. Thus, even those who use income as a measure of poverty recognize that this is a very crude proxy representing a far more complex phenomenon.
There are a number of problems with the income measure of poverty. One set of problems is that it assumes that all the various manifestations of poverty, including the things that poor people say they need to live a decent human life, can be assigned (without too much difficulty) a monetary value that can easily be measured. A more profound challenge comes from those who argue that an exclusive focus on income views people not only as individuals but as individuals who can “escape” from poverty and whose lives can be enhanced by their ability to attain a minimum income and by simply being given access to basic goods and services (health and education, for example), and so on. In sharp contrast to this view, a growing number of development professionals believe that our understanding of poverty needs to be broadened and shaped with far greater reference to the way people themselves understand what is of value to them in order to live humanely. In this view, while the elements that bring material well-being to individuals are clearly necessary, they are seen as incomplete and deficient or as merely means and not ends in themselves. When asked what is essential to them, people commonly make mention of personal security, living a life free of fear, and being able to participate freely in decisions about their lives and their families. Additionally, broader issues, such as ethnic and religious identity, are seen as critical to providing the core underpinning or meaning to people's lives, so that threats in these sensitive areas are perceived as leading to extreme deprivation.Footnote 4 These dimensions of human life in turn provide the basis for the capability approach to understanding poverty. From this perspective, the income approach to poverty and well-being is wholly inadequate. Rather, the capabilities approach provides a framework for defining poverty that is centered on a series of deprivations that prevent people from being able to live and develop to their full potential. The focus here is on what people value in their current lives in terms of the different freedoms they do or do not enjoy, and on their power and ability to make a range of key choices to enable them to develop and flourish. Here, poverty is defined as the denial of basic freedoms and the failure to achieve certain basic or minimal capabilities, or as “deprivation in the sphere of capabilities.”Footnote 5 What people need would include not only what is required to live for a “normal length of life” in terms of nutrition and health but also control of one's environment, including the ability to make informed political choices, the development of the senses (education and critical reflection), social interaction, protection against discrimination, as well as control over one's body and emotional development (developing attachments).Footnote 6 These strands of thinkingFootnote 7 have provided the intellectual impetus for developing the Human Development Index (HDI), the Human Poverty Index (HPI), the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), and the Basic Capabilities Index (BCI).Footnote 8
There are three reasons why this discussion of the definitions of poverty is crucial to the debates about how to eradicate extreme poverty.
• First, different definitions of poverty alter both the numbers of people living in poverty and their location. For instance, recent estimates suggest that 1.4 billion people are living on less than $1.25 a day, compared with 1.7 billion living below the recently constructed MPI, over 20 percent more.Footnote 9 However, those living in “chronic poverty” (a measure that focuses on long-term poverty) were recently estimated at 443 million.Footnote 10 According to the $1.25-a-day measure, 31 percent of extremely poor people live in South Asia, compared with 41 percent in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), whereas the MPI records the South Asian share of extremely poor people at 51 percent, with 28 percent living in SSA. Some country-level data varies even more sharply. For instance, according to the MPI, 90 percent of Ethiopians are extremely poor, whereas on the $1.25 basis the figure is 39 percent; in contrast, on the $1.25-a-day basis, 89 percent of Tanzania's population is extremely poor, whereas on the MPI index the figure is 65 percent.Footnote 11
• Second, whatever the debates about the particular measure of poverty to use, and about what factors need to be included in an understanding of poverty and its eradication, the consensus that poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon has profound implications for those wishing to provide direct help to poor people and communities. It means that external individuals or agencies involved in trying to eradicate poverty can never be satisfied with assistance that focuses on addressing either one or even the many manifestations of poverty. While this type of external assistance, if successful, will certainly help to address the problem identified—by supplying supplementary food, providing bed nets, raising immunization rates, sinking wells for clean water, promoting safe hygiene practices—on their own they will not result in the eradication of poverty.
The eradication of poverty requires action on many fronts. Indeed, the overwhelming experience of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with the longest experience of working on community-based projects has been that even when they provide assistance to meet quite a wide range of needs (including efforts to raise income levels), while improvements are certainly possible for targeted individuals and groups, the bulk of these interventions on their own have seldom resulted in the permanent end of extreme poverty for the majority of the beneficiaries. It was this insight, based on the cumulative evidence of many years of work, that led most of the larger international NGOs from the late 1980s onward to complement their work with grassroots communities with interventions geared to empowering the poor as well as to focus on advocacy, lobbying, and campaigning aimed at addressing the key political, institutional, and structural problems that impede the route to the longer-term and sustained eradication of poverty.
• Third, and relatedly, the acknowledgment of the multidimensionality of poverty raises questions about whether approaches to poverty alleviation should aim narrowly at saving lives. Providing sustenance to the hungry, health care and clean water to those generally at risk of disease, and bed nets to those living in malarial areas will undoubtedly save lives. However, single-focused “welfarist-type” interventions leave the bulk of those assisted still living in poverty, and not in control of their own lives, either individually or collectively. Thus, not only do they remain vulnerable to the range of diseases and premature death that are the common outcomes of extreme poverty, but most of the core dimensions of poverty included in the human development and capability-type approaches remain untouched.
Narrow interventions aimed exclusively at keeping people alive raise important (ethical) questions about the quality of the lives of those receiving such assistance. It is now increasingly accepted that it is morally wrong to keep chickens cooped up on “battery farms,” focusing merely on providing sufficient food, water, and medicine to keep the animals alive, but paying little to no heed to the welfare of the animals during their short lifetime. If when thinking about how best to aid people living in extreme poverty more attention were to be paid to “human flourishing,” or, more minimally, to basic well-being and agency, this would deepen our understanding of what is truly needed to assist human beings forced to live on the margins of life beyond the current focus merely on “saving lives.”
Theories of Change, Economic Growth, and Inequalities
For those who are extremely poor to have the prospects of a life permanently free of poverty requires a process of development. Although development is another (core) concept whose endpoint and component parts remain to this day the subject of disagreement and debate among development professionals, academics, and scholars, there is broad agreement that the elimination of poverty involves change—change that provides people with more opportunities and choices to live a more fully human life, which in turn usually require higher levels of income, though for many it requires far more. The work of development professionals provides three important insights that throw light on how best to eradicate poverty.
The first concerns the importance of “change processes.” Over time, there has been growing understanding of the importance of “theories of change” to any attempt to address poverty.Footnote 12 Direct assistance to poor people is provided with the aim of bringing (beneficial) change to their lives. Some interventions can potentially benefit both the powerless and the powerful—for example, by ridding a whole locality, or even the world, of a virulent cattle disease, such as rinderpest. However, most interventions involve economic, social, or political change aimed at assisting one group of people, and such change will be likely to affect the balance of power between different individuals and groups. What this suggests is the need to understand the change processes that are likely to result from such interventions. If an analysis of power relationships is not undertaken before an intervention takes place, there is a (potentially high) risk that the non-poor might benefit in ways that weaken the position of the poor in the wider society. For example, unless a careful assessment is made, a well-intentioned external agency that wishes to provide a village with clean water might be drawn to locate the new facility where the village leaders recommend it is placed, benefiting them disproportionately.
The second issue concerns the role, place, and pace of economic growth. At the aggregate level, the evidence suggests that wealth creation matters greatly for the eradication of poverty: it opens up opportunities for the poor to participate and engage in activities that provide them with gainful and productive employment, and it enables governments to fund the provision of basic goods and services. However, the evidence also suggests that, on the one hand, some economies have not been growing fast enough or for long enough in a sustainable manner to make a significant difference to the numbers of people living in poverty, and, on the other, that even when wealth has been created the process of growth has often been structurally flawed in that it has failed to incorporate those who are poor into the wealth-creation process. In particular, growth that has taken place in countries with large (structural) inequalities has been found to benefit poor people least (and not enable them to rise above an ethically acceptable minimal threshold). At the same time, growth that stimulates or results in ever-widening inequalities and disproportionate gains for the rich over the poor is likely to result in the rich and powerful adopting policies that further entrench their position and their disproportionate gains.
What recent research suggests is that efforts to accelerate the reduction in extreme poverty need to incorporate approaches and introduce policies that address and reverse the widening inequalities (both vertical and horizontal) that characterize many poor countries.Footnote 13 Countries where income inequality has decreased and where strong national growth has occurred in sectors in which the poorest are concentrated have had the greatest success in reducing poverty.Footnote 14 What is more, recent research shows that narrowing inequalities seems to boost rather than hold back further growth. A recently created coalition of academics, research institutes, and development agencies argues that the reduction of inequalities needs to be an integral and central part of development agendas, as inequalities are not only the outcome of but also drivers of vulnerability and poverty.Footnote 15
The third insight from academic work concerns the need for specific and targeted strategies for particular groups of poor people, sometimes referred to generically as “vulnerable groups.” The evidence is clear and compelling that in both low-income and middle-income countries, women and girls are poorer than men and boys, and more women and girls than men and boys are poor. Hence, gender matters greatly for effective poverty reduction, which is why since the mid-1990s the UN's annual Human Development Report has estimated values for the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). Likewise, disability accentuates and deepens poverty: a higher proportion of disabled people are poor and their poverty is more severe. Similarly, poverty is more acute for minorities and particular ethnic groups. In different ways, all these groups are disadvantaged because they are marginalized from mainstream society: they have less power in decision-making processes that affect them, fewer opportunities to gain access to goods and services necessary for their well-being, fewer opportunities to participate in general development processes, and less access to the outcomes of development processes.
Because many suffer multiple disadvantages, the task of eradicating poverty within these vulnerable groups is hugely challenging. The evidence is clear that the solution does not lie in adopting more, or more intense, “general” approaches to poverty eradication.Footnote 16 Targeted approaches and mainstreaming are required, but these have proved difficult to implement because they are likely to be resisted by dominant groups.Footnote 17 To make a difference to these especially vulnerable groups, far more needs to be done to deepen our understanding of the particular problems they face; and these problems differ radically across groups and within different countries, regions, and localities. This is a major challenge for two reasons: first, because in most countries vulnerable groups comprise the majority of those living in extreme poverty; and, second, because when marginal groups feel threatened, there is no guarantee that what they articulate and tell outsiders about their needs and wishes will necessarily and accurately reflect what they actually think and believe to be so.Footnote 18
Placing Aid in a Wider Context
What role can aid play in poverty eradication? A key initial question that needs to be answered is whether aid is necessary for development to occur and for extreme poverty to be eradicated.
At one level, the answer is simple. Most of today's wealthiest countries developed without aid from other countries or from private aid agencies; and many of today's richer developing countries are prospering with little to no aid funds. So the question to be answered is not whether aid is necessary for development to proceed (it clearly is not), but whether aid has any “added value” and, if so, what it is. Some hold an extreme view that aid is destructive of development, and that instead of helping to reduce extreme poverty it is always a “force for harm.”Footnote 19 Our focus here is on those who see aid as a force for good—either as it is currently given or altered (perhaps quite radically) to ensure it is focused on eliminating extreme poverty, either directly or indirectly.Footnote 20 Three possibilities might be considered:
• first, aid could help to speed up the general process of development and poverty eradication;
• second, if current development processes do not sufficiently benefit the poorest, aid could be targeted at and channeled directly to those living in extreme poverty; and,
• third, aid could be used to help alter the process of development so that wealth creation and decision-making become more inclusive of poor people.
In each case, aid would be adding value by reducing the number of people living in poverty faster than if it were not provided, or were provided differently. If one's view is that preventing people from dying or helping more people to live more fulfilling lives is an important moral imperative, then one will probably see providing aid as “necessary.”
Does the evidence suggest that aid contributes to speeding up the development and poverty eradication process in countries that receive it? This has been a central issue in the aid and development literature. Academics have tried to answer the question by examining the relationship between aggregate aid flows and economic growth. The bulk of studies have indicated that it has had a broadly positive impact.Footnote 21 However, the effect has been comparatively small: one of the most recent and rigorous studies suggests that an inflow of aid on the order of 10 percent of gross domestic product spurs the per capita growth rate by a little more than 1 percentage point per annum in the long run.Footnote 22 Surprisingly, very few academic studies have examined the effects of aid on the poorest; but a recent study that concludes that aid has had a positive impact on all income groups also suggests that those in middle- and higher-income groups have benefited more than the poorest. Thus, aid seems to have contributed to widening inequalities in recipient countries. The study also predicts that a doubling of aid would help middle-income groups more than both richer and poorer ones.Footnote 23
Most studies agree, unsurprisingly, that the contribution that aid makes to economic growth differs sharply in countries at peace (more growth) and in conflict (less growth). They also show that the overall impact of aid is reduced in countries where governance is poor and where institutions and the rule of law are weak; that the pace of poverty reduction is far slower when recipient governments and implementers of aid projects and programs are not committed to pro-poor policies; and some suggest that poverty reduction will be slower in countries that are less inclusive and democratic.Footnote 24 One conclusion to draw from these studies is that addressing these problems will enhance the effectiveness of aid. But a more important conclusion is that addressing these problems—improving governance, strengthening institutions and the rule of law, and deepening and extending local inclusive democratic processes—will greatly enhance the likelihood of higher growth and raise the prospects for faster poverty eradication, given the relatively minor overall contribution that aid seems to make.Footnote 25 An illustration of this point comes from recent studies that suggest that the poor state of the physical infrastructure in African countries reduces their annual growth rates by 2 percent a year.Footnote 26
In our globalizing world, there is growing recognition that international trade, financial flows and remittances, and global institutions and governance all matter for development and poverty reduction, and that systems and processes external to individual countries are influential in poverty reduction. There is also extensive evidence to show the ways that prevailing international rules, systems, structures, and processes impede poverty reduction within and across countries, and thus that these problems need to be addressed.Footnote 27 Some, such as Thomas Pogge, have gone further to argue, controversially, that these external factors are the prime cause of extreme poverty, and that unless far-reaching changes take place, extreme poverty will not be eliminated.Footnote 28 To the extent that current aid policies and programs reinforce the perpetuation of these factors or fail to address them, providing aid, or more aid, is no solution. What is required is that aid be used more directly to challenge and alter the core problems of the prevailing global system or that a different form of resource transfer from rich to poor be created that more directly addresses these structural deficiencies.Footnote 29
The funds that individuals give to private aid agencies worldwide, though sizeable, comprise a relatively small amount of the total aid provided to poor countries. Recent estimates (for 2009) indicate that globally private donations to NGOs totaled $22 billion—about 18 percent of the $120 billion in official development assistance (ODA) from countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Development Assistance Committee (DAC).Footnote 30 According to OECD figures, private donations to UK NGOs totaled $462 million, only 4 percent of official UK aid (ODA) of $11.4 billion. According to the Hudson Institute, those to U.S. private and voluntary organizations totaled $12 billion, 42 percent of official U.S. ODA. Worldwide, donations to NGOs would have to increase five and a half times to reach official aid levels.Footnote 31
Most individuals donating money to NGOs believe that the funds they provide should be directed to those who need them—the poorest. But what about official aid, which, in terms of size and scale, is of far greater importance? The short-term political and strategic interests of donors have always been a major determinant of the allocation of official aid, and these influences have increased in the past few years.Footnote 32 Recent studies suggest that some 60 percent of all ODA aid has regularly not been channeled directly to the sixty-five poorest countries of the world—a sum that is equal to one and a half times the total amount given privately to NGOs worldwide.Footnote 33 Additionally, the amount of aid given by official aid donors is characterized by its unpredictability and volatility, which makes it more difficult for recipients to plan to use such aid effectively. It is estimated that this volatility reduces the potential impact of official aid by as much as 20 percent, almost equivalent to the total amount privately given to NGOs worldwide.Footnote 34
Another set of problems concerns the perverse systemic effects of aid—an issue that would apply equally to official aid and the aid provided by NGOs and civil society organizations (CSOs). It might initially be thought that the more countries and donors there are that provide aid the better—assuming, of course, that the aid given has a beneficial impact. Likewise, it might be thought that a growth in the number of NGOs involved in aid projects and programs can only add to the cumulative effect of those already working in the field. However, it is increasingly being acknowledged that the growth in the number of official aid donors and aid projects is already having perverse systemic effects. Indeed, in signing the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005—which committed donors to a series of measures to synchronize and harmonize their individual efforts, to align their aid programs more closely with recipient country poverty-reduction plans, and to help to strengthen recipients’ ability to coordinate them—donors were confirming that the current approach to aid giving is seriously deficient and inefficient.Footnote 35 For instance, recipients dealt on average with around five bilateral and multilateral donors in the 1960s; today the number is over thirty.Footnote 36 Collectively, official donors were responsible for less than 10,000 individual projects in the early 1990s; today the number is over 90,000 and the average size of each project has been reduced by more than half.Footnote 37 In 2005 government authorities in Vietnam received 752 visits (missions) from donors—that is, more than two a day, including weekends and holidays.Footnote 38 In Tanzania, health workers in some districts spent more than twenty days a quarter—almost 25 percent of their working time—writing reports for different donors.Footnote 39
Where the Poorest People Are Located and Why it Matters to Strategies of Poverty Eradication
The vast majority of those living in extreme poverty used to live in some of the poorest (low-income) countries, such as Burkina Faso and Ethiopia. This is no longer the case. In large part because of changes in the classification of countries (rather than because poor people have moved), most extremely poor people today live in middle-income countries, such as Pakistan, Indonesia, India, and Nigeria.Footnote 40 Additionally, more and more of the poorest people live in what are termed “fragile states”—that is, countries with especially weak institutions, often lacking legitimacy and vulnerable to crises, some of which have been embroiled in conflict (for example, Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo).Footnote 41 Recent trends are summarized in Table 1.
Table 1 Where the poorest people are located
Source: Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz, Poverty in Numbers: The Changing State of Global Poverty from 2005 to 2015 (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institutions, January 2011).
Why is the location of the poorest people such a crucial issue? Surely all that really matters is that those concerned with extreme poverty focus their attention on those who are poor and the countries in which they live, and in the case of aid funds, that they work to ensure that aid is channeled to those countries and those people who need it most. There are two reasons why these changes in location matter. First, consider the extreme poor living in middle-income countries. Two important characteristics of very poor (low-income) countries is that they do not have sufficient resources and skills to enable everyone to have access to basic goods and services, and it is difficult for them to buy these or borrow them through the market. Aid, thus, has a very important role in terms of filling these resource and skill gaps. It can also help to strengthen governance, institutions, and the rule of law to make the economy more attractive to private investment and hence to raise growth levels.
In contrast, because (by definition) middle-income countries are wealthier, they will be able to access through the market the resources they need to provide all their people with basic goods and services; and they will tend to have stronger and more efficient institutions, and therefore be able to attract investment capital to enable them to grow. Thus, one of the most important reasons why large numbers of people continue to live in extreme poverty in such countries is because the public finance and expenditure choices their governments make and the incentive systems they oversee influence their economies’ patterns of growth. In short, politics is a major reason for the presence of extreme poverty in these countries. To simply provide aid to such countries in the form that it is given to the poorest countries, including channeling it directly to the poorest, positively encourages recipient country governments to perpetuate prevailing public finance allocation priorities and the funding of non-poverty-reducing activities. What is needed in such countries is a type of aid that (while clearly not ignoring the poorest) focuses on ways to engineer changes to current economic priorities; and this, in turn, is likely to require assistance that aims to strengthen civil society and democratic processes, that gives a greater voice to the marginalized, and that seeks to shift power away from those who promote and support policies that disproportionately advantage those who are richer.
Next, consider the problem of aiding poor people in fragile states. Fragile states are poor countries with particularly acute weaknesses in relation not only to their overall stability and vulnerability (often experiencing violence and conflict) but also in relation to governance, institutions, and the rule of law. Thus, as well as needing aid to help fill resource and skill gaps to provide greater access to basic goods and services, they need assistance to help them address these deep systemic weaknesses. The problem is that aid is likely to be most effective in countries and contexts that are characterized by good governance (transparent and open democratic processes and a free press), strong institutions, the rule of law, as well as a vibrant private sector: the precise opposite of the conditions prevailing in fragile states. Thus, fragile states are among the most extreme examples of the central dilemma facing the provision of aid—namely, that aid is needed most, and most urgently, in precisely those countries and contexts where it is least likely to be effective. Clearly, while aid agencies working in fragile states will strive to provide aid in forms that maximize its effectiveness, the reality is not only that some aid will be ineffective but that some degree of ineffectiveness is actually an expected outcome. If aid is to be judged solely in relation to its expected outcome, then agencies should provide less aid to fragile states and more to low-income non-fragile states and middle-income countries where the prospects of success are far better. This suggests that critical debate is needed on the best ways to balance need, risk, and effectiveness, including the moral dilemmas that are raised. To date, such a debate has not been sufficiently forthcoming.
The links between expectations and results embrace issues far wider than fragile states. Indeed, they go to the heart of development. In recent years, there has been a growing focus on impact and results in aid interventions. At one level, this is a very welcome development, as results really do matter. Footnote 42 For far too long, too many agencies have been too ready to rely on the notion that merely helping those in need provides a sufficient reason for donating to an NGO working with poor people. But it is equally important to draw on the decades-long experience of professionals working in the development field, which shows that the process of permanently lifting people out of poverty is not a quick fix. Indeed, it is not only likely to take a while but it is likely to suffer reversals, or to set in motion impact trajectories that either show no major short-term change or (not uncommonly) make things worse before they get better.Footnote 43 This, in turn, has profound implications for the types of aid interventions that agencies should be promoting and supporters championing.
An Agenda for Concerned Academics
Against this backdrop, this section considers what concerned academics (most especially those not working directly in the professional world of development) could do to help achieve faster progress in the eradication of world poverty; and the final section discusses some specific ways that concerned individuals might most effectively contribute.
Determining Priorities
There are two clusters of research areas that require more attention. The first is to contribute to the discourse about the nature of development and why poverty eradication is so important, a part of which needs to learn from and build on the evolving discourse on human rights and obligations and how human rights approaches can make a real difference to the lives of the very poor.Footnote 44 Advances here should in turn help to shed light on those specific issues important to poverty eradication (as has happened with climate change in the past decade or so) and help to assess those ongoing development issues—trade, debt, climate, corruption, and private foreign investment—that merit priority attention. One issue that academics from the (broad) field of philosophy could contribute more to is the ongoing debate on the nature and definition of poverty and its measurement, most notably (I believe) not only by continuing to contribute to our understanding of human fulfillment but by helping to work out what this means in practice, and by challenging approaches to poverty eradication that focus narrowly on merely keeping people alive and treating them as the passive objects of externally driven interventions.
The second area concerns what is called policy coherence. Rich-country governments have been challenged (and chided) for their inconsistencies in providing aid to help reduce if not eradicate poverty while at the same time pursuing policies the effects of which undermine that very effort. Examples include, in particular, fisheries and agricultural policies of the European Union.Footnote 45 In recent years, rich-country governments have increasingly acknowledged the importance of policy coherence and have commissioned studies (or welcomed studies from scholars) that have outlined the key issues.Footnote 46 However, the implementation of effective change has not kept pace with the rhetoric of “needing to do something.” More work is needed both to highlight a more complete set of current policy inconsistencies (and so update their effects and impact) and to put pressure on governments to change those policies that inflict the most damage. Thus, what is needed is more research as well as more policy influencing (campaigning, lobbying, and advocacy).
On their own, however, these initiatives, even if successful, are not likely to result in the fast eradication of extreme poverty in the poorer countries of the world. Many of the most important changes that need to occur to raise growth rates and promote a more pro-poor development strategy also require action within these countries. This is not widely understood. Rallying support to “drop the debt” or for “fair trade” suggests that action on these fronts matter most; but what happens to poor people within their own localities, regions, and countries matters greatly, and probably often matters more. The hard message is that poverty eradication will never be solved solely by outsiders: it requires domestically driven processes to address widening inequalities in wealth and power within poor countries.
Academics, Aid, and Aid Agencies
The following provides a summary of ten key areas or issues where aid could be made more effective, most of which are drawn from the earlier discussion.
1. In terms of its size, its reach, and its potential to have an impact on poverty eradication, official aid is far more important than aid provided by NGOs and CSOs. More official aid is “wasted” than the total amount of money contributed by individuals worldwide to all antipoverty organizations. This results from: the misallocation of aid caused by donors using aid to support their own short-term political and strategic (and in some cases commercial) interests; the volatility and unpredictability of official aid flows; and a range of systemic problems caused by there being too many donors whose individual aid projects and programs are insufficiently harmonized with each other and insufficiently aligned with recipient country poverty-reduction plans. Academics concerned that aid should make a difference for the poor could draw greater attention to this issue and contribute to the efforts of those individuals and agencies analyzing the inefficiencies of the current aid system and working to narrow the substantial gap between what official aid currently does and what it could potentially do for faster poverty eradication through research, lobbying, campaigning, and advocacy.
2. It is likely that a number of the systemic problems and inefficiencies of official aid, which have only quite recently been acknowledged, are being increasingly mirrored in the fast-expanding world of private antipoverty organizations and projects, though little robust analysis has been done in this area. What this suggests is that while those concerned with aid effectiveness at the grassroots level need to continue to learn about what works and what does not at the project level, they also need to learn more about the context in which development efforts are undertaken and ask more systemic questions about the role of different actors. These would include the way the poverty-focused activities of different NGOs and CSOs are related to each other and to other service providers, including those of government departments and agencies; how the activities of different agencies are coordinated; and especially how “service-delivery” projects of individual antipoverty organizations are integrated with those of other aid agencies and with the relevant departments and agencies of recipient country governments.
3. Poverty is multifaceted and its eradication requires action on a number of fronts. Aid focused on specific interventions (immunizing children, providing bed nets, and such) on their own and in isolation does not end poverty. Decisions on how to help those in poverty—and the types of aid most urgently required—need to be shaped and informed by knowledge of the importance of the different factors that contribute to extreme poverty and its perpetuation in different contexts, and how these might best be addressed. This knowledge needs to be informed in particular by the views of poor people. Academics concerned with aid's impact at the grassroots level need to support the work of those seeking answers to these key questions and, if they have the skills, they need to contribute to this important work.
4. In recent years, aid projects and programs have tended to focus increasingly on helping to keep people alive by ensuring those in need are provided with sufficient (nutritious) food, clean water, and essential medicines as part of a wider shift toward using a rising share of aid to address short-term individual welfarist needs. More research is needed to understand better how aid recipients view these forms of assistance, especially in relation to their own perceptions of the importance of the range of different deprivations they face, their view of what they need to live a more fully human life, their ability to make choices for themselves, and their dignity as human beings. Academics from the disciplines of ethics and moral philosophy would appear to have a particular, possibly unique, contribution to make in helping to answer these difficult but very important questions. Indeed, work in this field has already been profoundly influential in enriching our understanding of what poor people believe is important. However, further research is needed, including joint work with non-philosophers, and the insights need to be fed (better) into policy debates among development professionals and practitioners.
5. The shift toward a large and rising share of aid aimed at addressing the more immediate welfarist needs of individuals has meant that there is now a far greater similarity and overlap between the sorts of aid that NGOs and CSOs have traditionally provided and the aid provided by official aid agencies. These two categories of aid providers have been joined by a growing band of poverty-focused aid organizations funded by corporate philanthropists, such as the Gates Foundation, which are likewise focused on these types of interventions. Two key linked advantages that these big donors bring is the scale of their interventions and their greater ability to meet immediate needs and help build the capacities of recipient country line ministries to enable them to provide the services needed.Footnote 47 Academics concerned with aid's impact need to support work that would help to clarify the potential overlap between the work of different agencies and the potential and actual advantages of each. Many NGOs claim that their aid delivery projects add value by providing for particular needs with a range of different initiatives aimed at empowering local groups and thereby increasing their ability to access things they need for their development. Academics could support studies that assess the extent to which NGOs succeed in providing aid in this manner and how the effects of this component of NGO interventions are incorporated into overall assessments of whether such aid really worked.
6. Gainful remunerative employment (including self-employment) is widely recognized as a key route out of poverty: indeed, evidence suggests that poverty most commonly falls when employment rises.Footnote 48 However, a comparatively small proportion of aid is channeled to initiatives that are aimed at expanding employment opportunities, in part because donors seem to have little experience in this area. More worrying is evidence that suggests that in some contexts and countries aid to the social sectors has had a negative effect on employment.Footnote 49 Academics concerned with aid's role in poverty eradication need to support further work on the relationship of aid, employment, and poverty reduction.
7. Different rates and patterns of growth have a profound impact on the eradication of poverty: substantial inroads into poverty are far less likely in economies with large and widening inequalities and in countries with governments that are not committed to policies that explicitly address the needs of the poor. Most of the world's poorest people now live in middle-income countries. The key to faster poverty eradication in such countries is through political and faster democratic change, and civil society often provides a catalyst for such change. What this suggests is that a key role for aid in these countries and contexts is (judiciously) to help strengthen civil society to give greater voice to poor and marginalized groups. Academics concerned with aid's role in poverty eradication need to support further research on how aid might be used effectively to bring about political and democratic change at the national, regional, and local level in specific countries, and how this role for aid might most effectively be balanced with its role in directly meeting the immediate needs of poor people.
8. Philosophers, political scientists, and lawyers have already made significant contributions to uncovering and analyzing the reality of discrimination and the effects that vulnerability, marginalization, and the lack of power and voice make to the creation and perpetuation of poverty. Academics concerned with aid's role in poverty eradication need to build upon these contributions and work with development practitioners to ensure that these dimensions of poverty inform aid giving and aid effectiveness. They should also support further work on the ways that aid can be used to accelerate the reduction of poverty among different vulnerable and marginal groups.
9. Additionally, a large and growing proportion of those living in extreme poverty live in fragile states where the prospects of aid achieving its objectives are far lower than in less fragile and middle-income countries. Academics concerned with aid need to support studies that assess the role and importance of the (immediate and tangible) impact of aid in terms of ensuring that aid continues to be channeled to those who need it most. Academics from the disciplines of ethics and moral philosophy would appear to have a particular, possibly unique, contribution to make in helping to answer this difficult but central question.
10. It is not only believed that aid should be judged by the impact it has on those who need it but that the quicker the impact, the better the aid. In contrast, most studies of development processes show that many key factors that contribute to development often take some considerable time to make an impact, and that many positive processes critical to beneficial social and political change often have little to show (and may even produce adverse results) in the short term. Academics concerned with aid's impact should support research that helps to understand the value of different forms of aid and what time period one might expect different forms of aid to take to make a lasting impact, highlighting, too, the different ways that different sorts of aid might best be assessed.
Questions for Concerned Individuals
There are a variety of ways that concerned individuals can contribute to the faster eradication of poverty. For most, the choice lies in giving their time, skills, or money, or a combination of all three. But to whom should this contribution be directed?
This article has suggested that the most important ways to accelerate the eradication of extreme poverty is to address those factors constraining more rapid and more inclusive growth in the countries where the poorest live. As such, a “first priority” would be to support those (formal) organizations and (looser) networks that are highlighting these constraints and are working for their removal. This would predominantly be those involved in advocacy, lobbying, and campaigning at the global/international level—in particular industrialized countries and, importantly, organizations working in the countries where the extreme poor are most heavily concentrated.Footnote 50 A second priority would be to support the work of those international and nationally based organizations that monitor aid, highlight the current problems and weaknesses of official aid, and work to change current approaches and practices to align official aid giving and official donor aid practices more closely to the poverty eradication agenda. Many of the larger and older international antipoverty organizations already work in these two priority areas. These and many others also undertake or support projects and programs aimed at assisting poor people more directly. This is clearly also work that needs and deserves more support, but the problem is how one might go about choosing which organizations.
Boxes 1 and 2 provide an initial checklist of some of the key questions that one should pose to poverty-focused agencies working at the international, national, and local level when assessing whether they warrant support. As will be seen, some are not easy to answer, and a number will not be relevant to some agencies.
Box 1: Institutional and strategic questions to ask antipoverty organizations
• What is your core purpose and how do you go about trying to fulfill your objectives?
• How do you determine whether staff working on projects have the qualifications and set of professional skills necessary for the various areas of your work?
• How do you determine how the funds will be spent? Do you have different expectations of your likely success in different types of countries and working with different types of communities? How do you convey such expectations to your supporters?
• Do you undertake direct project, advocacy, lobbying, campaigning, and research work, and, if so, how do you determine the distribution of resources among these activities?
• Do you have a regular system of reporting on the results of your interventions? How do you present the results of interventions that have not led to the results expected?
• Do you have a system that enables supporters to access information on the results of your activities?
• Do you have a system accessible to supporters that provides a breakdown of project costs by category, such as salaries, travel, support to local partners, and direct project costs?
Box 2: Development questions for those working at the international, national, or local level
• How do you choose where to work and how do you work?
• Do you implement your own projects or programs or do you work with and through local organizations? If you work through locally based agencies, how were they selected?
• What process did you go through in determining where to work? Did this involve an assessment of what other agencies (governmental or nongovernmental) were working in the same locality? What do you bring that others did not?
• Have you undertaken you own analysis or used other studies to assess the incidence and extent of poverty in the localities where you have projects and programs? Did this involve discussions with poor and marginalized people and groups, and, if so, how did you identify these people and groups and how did you ensure they clearly identified their needs and expectations?
• How do you engage with and involve poor people and communities in the decisions about how they can best be supported, and how do you ensure that those from outside the project area who are brought in to assist are qualified to undertake the work they are assigned to do?
• What appraisal, monitoring, and evaluation system do you use to determine precisely what you expect your interventions to achieve and to assess their impact? In observing outcomes, how do you try to assess the contribution your interventions have made to eventual outcomes?
• What role do poor people and poor groups play in assessing your interventions?
• What proportion of the funds collected is used directly by poor people/groups? Are poor people/groups aware of the total funds deployed in selecting and managing projects for them, and do they have an input in determining how these funds are allocated? What process do you use to ensure that your activities are informed by the lessons and experiences of your own interventions and those of others?
It is likely that bigger and more well-established agencies will be better able to answer these questions than smaller ones, though these do not have to be international agencies. This is an important observation as it suggests that bigger, more experienced, and more independent organizations with a greater range and depth of skills and deeper knowledge of the countries in which they are working are more likely to make wiser choices about how to deploy their funds than are smaller and newer agencies, which are often run and staffed by people with little development and country experience. It should be added that there are not only many competent nationally based poverty-focused organizations but that many of these have a better understanding of poverty and especially how it might be eradicated faster than do some international agencies. Also, it must not be thought that it is only the bigger agencies that do good development work: many smaller, especially locally based, agencies perform very valuable work. Additionally, a number of smaller agencies set up by people now living in the industrialized world but based on a deep understanding of the local communities in need—such as Send a CowFootnote 51—continue to have a significant impact. The challenge is finding out about them.
After deciding which agency or agencies to support, the next question is how to support them. If the agencies chosen include campaigning or lobbying organizations, then part of one's involvement could include participation in these activities. As for methods of providing financial support, the most useful way is to provide core or unrestricted funds over the long term, rather than short-term, earmarked, or project-specific funds.Footnote 52
Finally, let me make one point regarding the systemic consequences of giving. Academics are not merely thoughtful people, but they play an influential leadership role in society.Footnote 53 If large numbers of academics group together and decide to support particular sorts of antipoverty organizations, if their numbers swell and they create a “movement of giving” or a “movement of action,” and if they choose to draw public attention to their actions, then those actions will have an influence on others. What this suggests is that academics, especially when acting together, need to be particularly careful about the broader messages they convey by how they give and the sorts of agencies they choose to support. Thus, if academics agree with the thrust of this article that the true eradication of poverty requires a range of approaches involving not only assisting poor people directly but also changing the structures, processes, and development paths that keep people poor and marginalized—where success is uncertain, where the risks of failures and setbacks are high, and where the outcomes are difficult to predict and the results often hard to measure—then it follows that academics should support effective and transparent antipoverty agencies that approach poverty eradication through this more complex lens.
