Escaping the trap: A new approach

Escaping the trap A new approach Ending Global Poverty A guide to what works By Stephen Smith* $20.00 Palgrave MacMillan ISBN 1-4039-6534-X

Over 800m people worldwide suffer from chronic hunger while over 10m children die each year from preventable causes. These are mind-numbing numbers but, as Stephen Smith shows in this call to arms, global poverty is something that "we can and should solve within our lifetime".

Ending Global Poverty explores the various traps that keep people in poverty - traps such as poor nutrition, illiteracy and lack of access to healthcare - and presents eight avenues of escape. He gives readers the tools they need to determine which approaches are most effective in fighting poverty and eventually overcoming it.

"It is one thing to know people are suffering," says Smith. "But it is another to know that this suffering can go on indefinitely, is largely unnecessary and that we could have done more to help - with potential benefits that could prove very significant for our own future." The book offers several complementary ways to understand poverty and its remedies: Problems pointed to by the poor themselves; the types of poverty traps or vicious cycles of poverty pointed out by poverty researchers and programmes to help solve them; the capabilities needed by the poor and programmes to help develop these capabilities; and the range of actions individuals can take to help end poverty.

Bookshelves in libraries, NGO repositories, university reference centres, and websites are crammed with well-meaning academic treaties on how to tackle poverty through self-help. Few get down to hands-on level and identify grassroots programmes and organisations that are helping people gain the capabilities they need to escape from poverty. This book highlights many of the most promising of these strategies in some of the poorest countries in the world: Ending global Poverty shows that although the task is daunting, it isn't necessary to be rich or powerful to help pull people out of extreme poverty. It is a valuable contribution to the issue and a heartening insight into what is happening on the ground.

In the process Smith has produced an eminently readable and inspiring compilation of how global poverty might be ended through a guide to what interventions work. Smith identifies eight doors to increasing income and offers keys to open them as the means for building further capabilities, assets and resiliency to the many shocks and risks faced by many people in developing countries. "Only with sufficient capabilities and assets can a person's escape be reasonably secure over the long run," he says.

The eight keys to escaping poverty traps.

Key 1: Health and nutrition for adults to work and children to grow to their potential

Key 2: Basic education to build the foundation for self-reliance

Key 3: Credit and basic insurance for working capital and defence against risk

Key 4: Access to functioning markets for income and opportunities to acquire assets

Key 5: Access to the benefits of new technologies for higher productivity

Key 6: A non-degraded and stable environment to ensure sustainable development

Key 7: Personal empowerment to gain freedom from exploitation and torment

Key 8: Community empowerment to ensure effective participation in the wider world

"The goals and means are often the same in the best poverty alleviation programmes," Smith maintains. "Health, education, environmental sustainability, personal and community empowerment, access to economic opportunity: All these are prerequisites for escaping poverty traps.

Effective poverty programmes don't just deliver services - they build capabilities and sustainable assets.

The following is a small sample of Smith's findings of things that work.

Endeavor (South America/ South Africa)

This project started with the coming together of five Latin American entrepreneurs - from Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, expanding last year to include South Africa.

The group works in middle income countries, but ones with high inequality and a significant number of poor people. The Endeavour project also seeks to close the gap between microfinance and the investment sources for large private and state owned firms in developing countries by providing support for SMME start-ups and expansion.

One of the objectives is to develop a cluster of dynamic role models for other potential entrepreneurs to emulate. The initiative does not invest financially but focuses on screening the most promising entrepreneurs, and then providing them with mentoring, training and opportunities for them to network with potential investors and business partners, as well as with other Endeavour entrepreneurs.

Initially, local Endeavour employees and volunteers nominate candidates to the pool of potential "Endeavour Entrepreneurs". Endeavour then relies on local and international volunteer business specialists through its "Venture Crops" programmes to help screen the best candidates from the pool. In addition to have a place to take the children so she can work, a mother sometimes needs basic education and support services. In response, an innovative, locally designed and managed educational programme for mother and child is taking root in towns and cities around Uganda.