Reducing Poverty: An Incomplete Objective?

Lifting billions of people out of poverty is an unchallenged, conventional wisdom of international development.  As the development community works hard to meet the Millennium Development Goals and come up with ways to move the poor into the higher income brackets either through aid or economic reform initiatives, I can’t help but wonder – are we focusing on the right issue?

This is the question being addressed by Dr. Anirudh Krishna of the Duke University in his recent piece in the Foreign Policy magazine.  Through his research of programs to lift people out of poverty in 200 communities all over the world, Dr. Krishna shows that in many cases there is an alarming discrepancy – while programs succeed in moving people out of poverty, the successes are erased by a large number of people who fall into poverty.

In Kenya, for example, more households, 19 percent, fell into poverty than emerged from it.  Twenty-five percent of households studies in the KwaZulu-Natal province of the eastern South Africa fell into poverty, but fewer than half as many, 10 percent, overcame poverty in the same period.  In Bangladesh, Egypt, Peru, and every other country where researched have conducted similar studies, the results are the same. In many places, newly impoverished citizens constitute the majority of the poor.  It’s a harsh fact that calls into question current policies for combating poverty.

A counter argument, of course, could be that we are not doing enough to lift people out of poverty and that strategies should be improved, such as, for example, moving away from aid into economic development initiatives according to some experts such as Bill Easterly.  However, such an argument is part of another debate important in its own right, and would completely ignore the point made by Dr. Krishna – and the point is that we should not only be concerned with lifting people out of poverty, but also keep in mind that the job is not done when they move up the income ladder.

When I started writing this blog, I thought of calling the reduction of poverty a wrong objective.  Few minutes into it, I think incomplete would be a better term to use.

Note: The article is not yet available on-line but is out in a hard copy issue.  You can monitor the FP website to see when its out in an electronic format.