activist stresses need to ‘act outside the box’ as pioneers

in anti-poverty strategies address United Nations forum

 

To overcome poverty, people needed to “act outside the box”, in addition to thinking outside it, Kenyan anti-poverty activist Wahu Kaara said yesterday at a United Nations forum on poverty.

At the opening session of the International Forum on the Eradication of Poverty on Wednesday, Ms. Kaara had called for new partnerships, stronger involvement of civil society and full guarantee of the rights to food, health and education.  She had also called for less intervention by “development technocrats” and “a multi-billion industry built on parachuting development”.

The Forum, held on 15 and 16 November, brought together some 200 economists, civil society leaders and field practitioners from around the world to discuss novel ways to reduce poverty.

Addressing the closing session on “Thinking Outside the Box, Innovative Approaches”, MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, Chairman of One Laptop per Child, said his organization aimed to provide inexpensive, durable laptop computers to millions of children in developing countries, “leveraging the children themselves as agents of change”.  The “XO” laptop would provide children with access to the Internet, enhance education and ultimately raise the standard of living for poor children worldwide.

Assembly-line production of the laptop had just started, he said, and the models would undergo five months of severe tests.  The laptops would go to Governments who pledged to give one to each schoolchild.  Five countries -– Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand –- were involved in the first phase of the project, while various other Governments had expressed interest.  In Libya, Muammar al-Gaddafi was making sure each of the country’s 1.2 million children would have one.

The goal was to produce 3 to 5 million laptops in 2007 and 50 to 150 million in 2008, Mr. Negroponte said.  Companies such as Intel and Quanta, the largest world producer of laptops, had “jumped in”, adapting their production to the special requirements of the XO laptop.

Speaking at the same session was Patrick Mulvany of the non-profit, United Kingdom-based Practical Action.  “We need local control of technology”, he said, “starting with local decision-making about food systems”.  Imposed models of irrigation had not worked in an Andean district near Cuzco, but, when local farmers had reverted to communal irrigation systems dating back to pre-Inca times, yields of some 250 local varieties of potatoes had increased dramatically.

Likewise, in Sri Lanka, boats following the traditional design worked better than modern imported versions, and, in Zimbabwe, farmers using traditional farming techniques were producing adequate amounts of food in spite of the current difficult circumstances.  “We should be looking at technology as if people mattered,” he said.

MIT professor Iqbal Z. Quadir, the third speaker at the closing session, told how, while working as an investment banker on Wall Street in the 1990s, he had come up with the idea of making cellphones easily available to poor villagers in his native Bangladesh.  After developing a vision for universal access to mobile phones, he had persuaded Muhammad Yunus,founder ofthe microcredit provider Grameen Bank, and the Norwegian telephone company Telenor, to create GrameenPhone.  In just 10 years, the company had provided virtually universal access to telephony in Bangladesh and self-employment opportunities for the rural poor.

GrameenPhone enabled poor villagers, most of them women, to own a Village Phone subscription and retail the phone service to their fellow villagers, providing them with an income-earning opportunity, he said.

Today, GrameenPhone was the largest telephone company in Bangladesh, a profitable venture with more than 6 million subscribers.   It had given telephone access to more than 80 million people in areas where no such service had been available before, also creating self-employment opportunities to more than 200,000 Grameen Bank borrowers.  In 2005, GrameenPhone had posted a profit of around
$200 million and made investments worth $1.2 billion.

Addressing a special lunchtime event on Thursday were Professor Pedro Sanchez, Director of the Millennium Villages Project of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, and Dr. Patrick Mutuo, the project’s science Coordinator.  Under that project, 78 Millennium Villages -- extremely poor, chronically hungry and disease-ridden communities, now involving 390,000 people in 10 African countries -- were breaking the cycles of hunger, malaria and HIV/AIDS, Mr. Sanchez said.

The project was launched in 2004, he continued.  Rapid development of selected villages was tackling poverty in all its complex dimensions, from preventing and treating malaria to improving farming methods for robust harvests, at a cost of just $110 per person, per year, for five years.  In the Millennium Villages, people now had enough food to eat and surplus to sell in markets, and malaria was going down by 50 per cent.  “We are using ‘silver bullets’ –- 15 or 20 of them,” he said, such as education for all children and insecticide-treated bed nets.  “If you use them one by one they don’t work as well, but all together they do.”

The cost of the project was around $170 million a year, he said.  The project was working with the United Nations Development Programme, and the private philanthropic sector was supporting it.  Japan and entities such as George Soros’ Open Society Foundation had provided substantive financing, and philanthropists who preferred to remain anonymous had adopted a village for five years.  The problem now was how to scale up the project.  There were some 100,000 such villages in “hunger hot-spots” in sub-Saharan Africa, each of them with a population of around 5,000 people, who could benefit from the project.

“There is an ‘exit strategy’,” Mr. Sanchez said in response to a question about whether the project would promote a culture of dependency on external assistance.  The project sought to help villages become productive and sustainable communities; people in the Millennium Villages knew that the project would be for a time, and were planning accordingly.  But, “the silent resignation that had reigned in these villages has been replaced by hope”, he said.

Summing up the recommendations of the two-day forum, Assistant
Secretary-General for Development Jomo Kwame Sundaram said the poor needed access to a broad range of financial services, and should enjoy greater political participation and acknowledgement of their rights.  Women, who often did not have access to the assets of their own household, and who were often poor even if the household was not, needed full access to assets and sources of financing.

Children, who experienced poverty in a different way from adults, should be engaged in the planning and implementation of development programmes, he said.  There was a need for authentic participation of the poor in the programmes aimed at them, and that was still not happening enough.  Developing countries should seek to create universal social security systems, decent work should become part of all development strategies, and more partnerships should be created with the private sector, which was playing a significant role in poverty reduction.

The Forum, which marked the end of the First United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (1997-2006), was organized by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs and 14 entities of the United Nations system, in cooperation with the German Development Agency (GTZ) and various non-governmental organizations.

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For information media • not an official record