Releasing Resources For Community Development

Paradigms change to release resources for community development
One aspect of community development is concerned with the development of public or communal wealth (services such as schools, clinics, roads, market-places, water supplies, sanitation and even access to human settlements facilities). The other looks more at private (individual or family) wealth, and how an individual or small group of community leaders can make important contribution to its development.

What is presented here pertains to what an individual community leader need to know, and the skills needed to promote poverty reduction as documented by Dr. Phil Bartle, from his 6 years of experience as Chief Technical Adviser and National Co-ordinator, of CMP. CMP is the Community Management Programme of Uganda, executed by United Nations HABITAT and implemented by the Directorate of Community Development of the Government of Uganda.

The potential strength and amazing resilience of communities has become evident. There is also the realization that all communities, no matter how poor, have resources (though many still need to be identified) that can be tapped. But to tap these resource and release them for sustainable development, paradigms change and training are needed.

Poverty and wealth
It starts with a basic understanding of poverty and wealth.

While your long term goal may be the eradication of poverty. You will not eliminate it by temporarily alleviating the discomfort and pain caused by poverty. Those are symptoms. We must identify the factors of poverty, and counteract those powerful negative forces. We must devise methods to create genuine wealth as a sustainable process of growth.

Every great military leader will tell you that, to defeat the enemy, you need to know all about that enemy. If we are to defeat poverty, then we must know much about poverty (not only its symptoms) and about wealth.

We do not tell you everything about poverty here but introduce you to the main elements.

In understanding the nature and causes of poverty and wealth, we must first discard some common assumptions. Poverty is not merely the absence of money. Wealth is not merely the possession of money. Poverty and wealth go far beyond the absence or presence of money.

Money can be used sometimes as a measure of wealth, a means to store wealth, and a useful set of symbols for the exchange of wealth. But money is not wealth, and the nature of poverty is far more interesting and challenging than just the absence of money. Once you start with this radical or revolutionary idea, that wealth is more than money, and that poverty is more than the lack of money, then you can learn how to more successfully attack the common enemy, poverty.

This is not to belittle money. In our fight against poverty, money can be a very useful tool and generate wealth. But money itself will not eliminate poverty.

A community leader need three things to contribute to the removal of poverty: (1) an understanding of concepts and principles (2) some skills in training, facilitating and organizing, and (3) personal characteristics, including integrity, motivation and creativity.

Wealth
If money is not the same thing as wealth, and just adding money will not eliminate poverty, then what is wealth and how will it help to fight poverty? If money is not the same thing as wealth, and just adding money will not eliminate poverty, then what is wealth and how will it help to fight poverty?

If we look at the economist’s definition of wealth, we will come closer to seeing how it will be used in the fight against poverty. Economists talk about “goods and services” with value, but even “goods” have value only in the extent to which they provide a service. The key concept, here, is value. Something has relative value according to two attributes, (1) if it is relatively useful (has utility) and (2) if it is relatively scarce.

Any of us who have been short of cash feel that we know what poverty is. But the experience of individual poverty, which is alleviated by getting some money, is very different from the social problem of poverty, which a problem of the whole economy. The social problem of poverty is lack of wealth, not lack of money. For low income persons, poverty is also how wealth is distributed through the society. If you add money to the system, you only create inflation, and that does not rid society of poverty. Ultimately the answer to fighting poverty, the social problem, then, is not to add money but to create or generate wealth and not merely income generation.

You can do three things with wealth: (1) consume it, (2) store it, and (3) invest it.

To illustrate this, let us take the example of an African farmer. Let us say she has just harvested a crop of corn. She can (1) consume, (2) store, or (3) invest it. She can cook and eat some, with her friends and relations; that is to (1) consume. She can put some away in a container; that is to (2) store. If parasites and pests destroy some of the stored corn, we will just call that an unfortunate form of consumption. She can also put some of the corn aside to use as seed, to plant and grow further crops in the future. This is (3) investment of her wealth, corn (which is relatively scarce and useful).

The clue to increasing wealth in an economic system, then, is investment, where immediate consumption is forgone in the present or short run, in order to make increased production of wealth in the future. Our modern complex world is not as simple as that of one farmer making three choices, but the principle remains the same, investment leads to increasing wealth, and fighting poverty.

Poverty
What causes poverty? Lack of money is a measure and a symptom of poverty; not a cause. Treating the symptom will not cure the disease.

We can not fight poverty by alleviating its symptoms, but only by attacking the factors of poverty.

The simple transfer of funds, even if it is to the victims of poverty, will not eradicate or reduce poverty. It will merely alleviate the symptoms of poverty in the short run. It is not a durable solution. That solution is the clear, conscious and deliberate removal of the big five factors of poverty.

A “factor” and a “cause” are not quite the same thing. A “cause” can be seen as something that contributes to the origin of a problem like poverty, while a “factor” can be seen as something that contributes to its continuation after it already exists.

Poverty on a world scale has many historical causes: colonialism, slavery, war and conquest. There is an important difference between those causes and what we call factors that maintain conditions of poverty. The difference is in terms of what we, today, can do about them. We can not go back into history and change the past. Poverty exists. Poverty was caused. What we potentially can do something about are the factors that perpetuate poverty.

It is well known that many nations of Europe, faced by devastating wars, such as World Wars I and II, were reduced to bare poverty, where people were reduced to living on handouts and charity, barely surviving. Within decades they had brought themselves up in terms of real domestic income, to become thriving and influential modern nations of prosperous people. We know also that many other nations have remained among the least developed of the planet, even though billions of dollars of so-called “aid” money was spent on them. Why? Because the factors of poverty were not attacked, only the symptoms. At the macro or national level, a low GDP (gross domestic product) is not the poverty itself; it is the symptom of poverty.

The factors of poverty lie in disease, ignorance, dishonesty, apathy and dependency.

Disease – Disease causes the labour supply of the society to be less productive. Sickness and death subtract from one of the three main factors of production, human labour. Disease itself can be reduced by a greater understanding of how to prevent disease, and ensuring that public wealth intended to be used to prevent and cure disease is not diverted for personal gain. Thus the factors of poverty are inter linked: dishonesty and ignorance contribute to disease, and all three contribute to poverty.

Ignorance – Ignorance is not a shameful thing, it is merely a fact. It is caused by isolation so that some people do not know some things simply because they have not heard of those things (information). Other factors of poverty can contribute to ignorance, including disease and dishonesty. Both those factors contribute to a lower availability of education and information.

Dishonesty – When a person in a position of trust diverts a hundred units of value towards personal use, the community at large may lose much more than a hundred units of value that could contribute to development and to the reduction of poverty. That is part of what economists call the “multiplier effect.” Dishonesty thrives in an atmosphere of apathy, ignorance and dependency, so here is another example of the inter-linking of factors of poverty.

Apathy – Apathy is when people do not care, or when they feel so powerless that they do not try to change things, to right a wrong, to fix a mistake, or to improve conditions.

Sometimes, some people feel so unable to achieve something, they are jealous of their family relatives or fellow members of their community who attempt to do so. Then they seek to bring the attempting achiever down to their own level of poverty. Apathy breeds apathy.

Dependency – Dependency results from being on the receiving end of charity. In the short run, as after a disaster, that charity may be essential for survival. In the long run, that charity can contribute to the possible demise of the recipient, and certainly to ongoing poverty.

It is an attitude, a belief, that one is so poor, so helpless, that one can not help one’s self, that a group cannot help itself, and that it must depend on assistance from outside. The attitude, and shared belief is the biggest self justifying factor in perpetuating the condition where the self or group must depend on outside help.

Community development as an alternative to giving charity provides assistance, capital and training aimed at low income communities identifying their own resources and taking control of their own development. However, all too often, when a project is aimed at promoting self reliance, the recipients, until their awareness is raised and paradigms changed, expect, assume and hope that the project is coming just to provide resources for installing a facility or service in the community.

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