International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

Yesterday was World Food Day , and now to-day is the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

The poverty rate in the United States has now risen to 13.2 percent, the highest level in eleven years and forty million people without healthcare . And around the world, two billion people, or a full third of humanity, are poor, living on less than two dollars a day. One billion live in extreme poverty, earning less than a dollar a day. Half-a-million women die every year giving childbirth or for pregnancy-related reasons. And pregnancy is not a disease. A billion people in the world live in slums, and that number will double in the next twenty years. Kibera in Kenya is Africa’s largest slum. There are a million people living there. There are water pipes that go through Kibera to provide water to the rich neighborhoods, and yet the people of Kibera don’t have clean drinking water.

All the approaches to eliminating poverty—foreign aid, technological development, trade, increased trade and investment have failed. In Africa, for example, investing in countries like Chad or the Democratic Republic of Congo has only enriched the powerful.

Non-Governmental Organisations in general come in to assist where governments fail. Many of them claim they are now shifting their focus to the economic development of poor countries. But it is common knowledge, from the concrete situation on the ground, that the main thrust of NGO activity is still within the framework of alleviation and not eradication of poverty and want. NGOs can neither transform or reform the nature of capitalism. Poverty and want are necessary offshoots of the capitalist socio-economic formation. Trying to get rid of the former whilst leaving the latter intact amounts to putting the cart before the horse.

The only genuine assistance the NGO community could offer to the suffering people of this capitalist world is to stop collaborating with the owners of capital and instead, join forces with socialists to get rid of this system based on money. NGOs could use their resources to help usher in a system where production is not for profits' sake but for the satisfaction of needs. Under such a system nobody will have to run around begging for funds in order to help the needy—in fact there wouldn't be any more needy people.