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DEVELOPMENT: Poverty Hearings Show People Behind the Numbers

Mirela Xanthaki

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 26 2008 (IPS) - Benjamine Agbodjan Ablavi of Togo says she scraped together the money to pay her own school fees by selling fruit.

“School has to be free,” she told a gathering of civil society and development activists meeting in New York this week. “There are so many countries in Africa now where people say education is free. It is theoretically free, but when I look around, it is not.”

“A Day of Voices”, held Tuesday, gave the opportunity for average people from across the globe, like Ablavi, to share their experiences and publicly gather their testimonies in hopes of catching the ears of decision-makers.

The Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP), a massive coalition of civil society groups, with support from the U.N. Non-Governmental Liaison Service and the U.N. Millennium Campaign, organised the hearings on the sidelines of the 63rd U.N. General Assembly, which is being attended by more than 100 world leaders.

“What we need to realise is that this idea of holding hearings can give great strength. Any country that hasn’t had, should have public hearings. This galvanises and links the various networks that are part of the people power. That’s our strength,” said Mary Robinson, a former U.N. high commissioner for human rights and the president of the Ethical Globalisation Initiative.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – which were the focus of Tuesday’s hearings – include a 50-percent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger; universal primary education; promotion of gender equality; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; combating the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a North-South global partnership for development.

With advocates and witnesses from more than 10 countries on three continents, the hearings are part of 50 days of global action organised to increase public awareness of the MDGs. The diverse participants included development experts, indigenous peoples and those who have experienced firsthand the effects of poverty, lack of schooling and climate change.

Since the Millennium Declaration on the MDGs was signed in 2000, there has been an increase of 150 million hungry people in the world, activists say. The number of chronically hungry people is now a billion – a figure not seen since the 1970s. The group ActionAid that estimates a further 750 million are food insecure. That’s a quarter of humanity in total.

Asked how ActionAid came by that figure, since the U.N. MDG Monitor reports a decrease in the number of hungry people, International Head of Campaigns of ActionAid Colm O’Cuanacháin told IPS: “In 1996, when world leaders attended the world food summit, they promised to halve the number of hungry people in the world by 2015.”

“In 2000, when world leaders attended the Millennium Summit they made a lesser promise – to halve the proportion of people in hunger, two very different numbers,” he noted. “It is true that there had been a slight decrease in the proportion of hungry people up until the recent tragic spike in figures, but the real number of actual hungry people has increased year after year since 2000.”

The main obstacle, experts say, is a lack of will on the part of the world’s richest countries, rather than a lack of resources.

“If donors were to deliver on the aid levels they have committed to in the Monterrey Consensus [0.7 percent of Gross National Income], and if the recommended 10 percent of this went to agriculture, as demanded in the Comprehensive Framework for Action, the 21 billion dollars a year that would flow towards farming and food production would end hunger,” O’Cuanacháin said.

“To put this figure of 21 billion dollars a year in context, it is less than then one-tenth of the 267 billion dollars spent on agricultural subsidies in rich countries last year,” he said.

According to Archbishop Njongonkulu Winston Hugh Ndungane, of South Africa, recent data indicates that the ability of the poor to feed themselves has eroded dramatically with the current global economic crisis.

“In South Africa, the price of bread has increased three times in the last couple of months,” he said. “The price of paraffin has almost doubled. Individuals who were just surviving with a dollar a day have now been plunged into deep poverty, since a dollar can buy them even less now.”

Although the MDG target on universal primary education for boys and girls has made some of the most significant progress, particularly in Africa, there are still 75 million children out of school.

Raquel Castillo of Real World Strategies for Education for All cited the example of a 12-year-old girl who killed herself because her parents couldn’t afford the money to pay her school fees. The amount she needed was two dollars.

“Today, 2.5 billion people lack access to basic sanitation [and] 900 million people lack access to water. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, we need about 100 years more from today to achieve the sanitation targets at this rate. Imagine who will wait 100 years for a toilet,” said Jamillah Mwanjisi from the African Civil Society Network on Water and Sanitation.

Environmental degradation and climate change are also having a major negative impact on anti-poverty campaigns. Monique Essed Fernandes of the Women’s Environment and Development Organisation stressed that climate change must be understood as a development issue, which “cross-cuts all sectors and governments, and has social, cultural, economic and political dimensions, as well as poverty and gender dimensions.”

Of the 1.3 billion people living in the deepest poverty worldwide, the majority are women (some estimates say 70 percent). While women work two-thirds of the world’s hours and produce half the world’s food, they only earn 10 percent of the world’s income and own less than 1.0 percent of property.

The hearing ended with the hope that these compelling testimonies will inject a sense of urgency, and that the voices of those who have been routinely excluded from political and economic decision-making will reach across the U.N. headquarters to the General Assembly meetings, which conclude Oct. 1.