POVERTY VS DEVELOPMENT

POVERTY VS DEVELOPMENT

Poverty Vs. Development. A never ending issue which were and still discussed and debated until the current time. This involves the whole world living in various countries under the order of the government. What makes this issue so popular till today is due to the experience and hardship for it to meet closure. Poverty is the state of one who lacks a certain amount of material possessions or money. For most of history poverty had been mostly accepted as inevitable as traditional modes of production were insufficient to give an entire population a comfortable standard of living. Development refers to the sustained, concerted  actions of policymakers and communities that promote the standard of living and economic health of a specific area. 

 Poverty towards the environment which affects the poor people in the less develop country who cannot meet their subsistence  needs through purchase. They are forced to use common property or private resources such as forests for food and fuel, and ponds and rivers for water. The poor often have no alternative when the environment resources they depend on are degraded. The poor are also affected by the debt acquired by developing countries through loans for development. This makes for a worrying situation for third world development and poverty alleviation . Poverty and third world debt has been shown to result in resource stripping just to survive or pay off debts. For example, Nepal and Bangladesh have suffered from various environmental problems such as increasingly devastating floods, often believed to be resulting from large-scale deforestation.

The key poverty measures includes growth population, income inequality and infant mortality. There is a direct relationship between poverty and health and the two most common measures used are infant mortality and life expectancy. Children born to poor mothers will have less chance of surviving because of the harsh conditions they live under. In developing countries the IMR  is much higher than in developed countries with many babies dying from diarrhea, AIDS and malaria. Life expectancy is the average years that a person can expect to live in a particular country. Income inequality refers to as percentage of population with income less than some fixed proportion of median income. For example, subsistence farmers, may have a low cash income without a correspondingly low standard of living – they are not living "on" their cash income but using it as a top up). Many of the problems associated with underdevelopment in the world are linked to high population growth rates. If the worlds' population continues to grow at this rate, it is unlikely that there will be enough food, water and living space for all of us in the future. Unmanaged population growth can lead to disaster for the world. Apart from food shortages, population growth also puts incredible additional pressure on the environment in the form of pollution, deforestation and the use of natural resources like water and coal.  

 Effects of poverty create a "poverty cycle" operating across multiple levels, individual, local, national and global. Health is the significant effect which means death. One third of deaths – some 18 million people a year or 50,000 per day – are due to poverty-related causes: in total 270 million people, most of them women and children, have died as a result of poverty since 1990. Those living in poverty suffer disproportionately from hunger or even starvation and disease. According to the World Health Organization, hunger and malnutrition are the single gravest threats to the world's public health and malnutrition is by far the biggest contributor to child mortality, present in half of all cases. Education purposes also are affected due to poverty. Research has found that there is a high risk of educational underachievement for children who are from low-income housing circumstances. Instruction in the US educational system, as well as in most other countries, tends to be geared towards those students who come from more advantaged backgrounds. For children with low resources, the risk factors are similar to others such as juvenile delinquency rates, higher levels of teenage pregnancy, and the economic dependency upon their low income parent or parents. A child's "home activities, preferences, mannerisms" must align with the world and in the cases that they do not these students are at a disadvantage in the school and most importantly the classroom. Therefore, it is safe to state that children who live at or below the poverty level will have far less success educationally than children who live above the poverty line. Another devastating effect is violence. According to experts, many women become victims of trafficking, the most common form of which is prostitution, as a means of survival and economic desperation.

             Poverty in Malaysia is a controversial economic issue. Although the apparent focus of government policy has been on addressing poverty in rural communities, commentators have argued that due to urbanisation — the proportion of Malaysians living in urban areas increasing from 27% in 1970 to 62% in 2000 — the urban communities have been unfairly neglected. The official figure for urban poverty is given as 2%; critics have argued that this significantly underestimates urban poverty, as the poverty line is set at RM500 per month for a family of four — a monthly income which has been argued as unrealistically low for a family of four to meet its needs. A survey of Kuala Lumpur has suggested that about a quarter of the population lives in squatter  settlements, which commentators like Bakri Musa have argued is a more reasonable estimate of the poverty rate. However,as of December 2007, the squatter settlement has been totally eradicated in the state of Selangor. The recent economic turbulence of 1997 and 1998 brought higher unemployment, higher prices, and lower incomes. This particularly affected the most vulnerable social groups of society, not only in rural areas, but also in major urban centers. Nevertheless, there were no large groups of people migrating from the country, and Malaysia's quality of life remained much better than in neighboring Indonesia, the Philippines, or Thailand. Around 6.8 percent of the population lived below the poverty line in 1997, most of them in East Malaysia (for comparison, in the neighboring Philippines 32 percent of the population lived below the poverty line in 1997). The economic recovery of 1999 and 2000 reversed the decline in incomes and standards of living. Poverty in Muslim World. The Islamic world is enormous with over 1.2 billion people, stretching from Senegal to the Philippines – comprising six regions: North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Term used in Islamic literature for a poor person is "Faqeer". A person is considered to be a Faqeer or Poor who do not have sufficient material wealth in hand to satisfy his/her basic needs which are defined in fiver broad categories. Word "Faqeer” is mentioned in the Qur’an twelve times. Careful examination of these verses reveals that two speak of spiritual poverty. According to several studies, access to financial services in Muslim societies is either grossly inadequate or exclusive. In a recent study for the 2007 World Bank conference on Access to Financial Services, Patrick Honohan estimated the fraction of the adult population using formal financial intermediaries as a measure of financial access for over 160 countries. The study reveals that out of the 44 OIC  member countries for which the estimate is available, in 17 countries only one-fifth or less of their adult population have access; in 21 countries one-fourth or less have access and in 31 countries one third or less have access to formal financial services. The numbers in non-member countries like India, are no less alarming. In a report submitted to the Ministry of Minority Affairs, a committee of top bankers under the chairmanship of Mr Nasser Munjee observes that just 20.3 per cent among the minority community had accounts in public-sector banks while this percentage is 79.7 per cent for the majority community.

On the other hand, develop countries such as Europe, North America and Asian like Japan  have the capacity to produce a lot of material goods necessary for human survival which leads to development aid or development cooperation.  Financial aid given by governments and other agencies to support the economic, environmental, social and political development of developing countries. It is distinguished from humanitarian aid by focusing on alleviating poverty in the long term, rather than a short term response. The term development cooperation, which is used, for example, by the World Health Organisation (WHO) [1] is used to express the idea that a partnership should exist between donor and recipient, rather than the traditional situation in which the relationship was dominated by the wealth and specialised knowledge of one side. About 80-85% of developmental aid comes from government sources as official development assistance (ODA). The remaining 15-20% comes from private organisations such as "Non-Governmental Organisations" (NGOs), foundations and other development charities. Development aid was aimed at offering technical solutions to social problems without altering basic social structures. Development aid is often provided by means of supporting local development aid projects. Private consulting firms, such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte, are increasingly being contracted by donor agencies to manage and implement elements of their aid program, due to their perceived ability to perform higher quality program management and delivery. The Commitment to Development Index measures the overall policies of donors and evaluates the quality of their development aid, instead of just comparing the quantity of official development assistance given. Various poverty reduction strategies are broadly categorized here based on whether they make more of the basic human needs available or increase the disposable income needed to purchase those needs which later on will attribute into development. Increasing the supply of basic needs. Before the industrial revolution, poverty had been mostly accepted as inevitable as economies produced little, making wealth scarce . The initial industrial revolution led to high economic growth and eliminated mass absolute poverty in what is now considered the developed world. Today, mass production of goods in places such as rapidly industrializing China has made what were once considered luxuries, such as vehicles and computers, inexpensive and thus accessible to many who were otherwise too poor to afford them. In addition to industrialization, agricultural technologies such as nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides and new irrigation  methods have dramatically reduced food shortages in modern times by boosting yields past previous constraints. Strategies to provide education cost effectively include deforming children, which costs about 50 cents per child per year and reduces non-attendance from anemia, illness and malnutrition, while being only a twenty-fifth as expensive as increasing school attendance by constructing schools. A study by Oxford University shows that schoolgirl absenteeism could be cut in half by providing free sanitary towels. Also, when women are given more capabilities and opportunities, they seem more altruistic  in helping the family and more likely to prioritize education. Desirable actions such as enrolling children in school or receiving vaccinations can be encouraged by a form of aid known as Conditional Cash Transfers.

People's centered development is a development model that does not just focus on the economy. It stresses the importance of developing people in a community and letting them participate actively in the development programmes. For these theorists plans for development have to be more than just trying to fix the economy in the hope that wealth will trickle down to the poor, if and when the economy grows. It stresses that people themselves have to decide what action plan is best for them and have to actively participate in changing their lives. It starts with people defining their needs and empowering them to take action. The people's centered approaches are usually used for small-scale development programs such as the kind that may be undertaken in local communities by local governments or NGOs. They are also suitable for large-scale development programs such as those organised in the Public Works program. People's centered development emphasizes that development should not be top-down with an outside development agency telling the community what to do. It should also not be exclusively bottoms-up approach but must always involve the community as a partner to any development agency or facilitator. Some of the methods that we cover elsewhere on participatory rapid appraisal , community involvement and community consultation from part of the people-centred approach to development. Financial services in developing poor countries. Another form of aid is microloans, made famous by the Grameen Bank, where small amounts of money are loaned to farmers or villages, mostly women, who can then obtain physical capital to increase their economic rewards. For example, the Thai government's People's Bank, makes loans of $100 to $300 to help farmers buy equipment or seeds, help street vendors acquire an inventory to sell, or help others set up small shops. Those in poverty place overwhelming importance on having a safe place to save money, much more so than receiving loans. Also, a large part of microfinance loans are spent on products that would usually be paid by a checking or savings account. Lack of financial services, as a result of restrictive regulations, such as the requirements for banking licenses, makes it hard for even smaller micro savings programs to reach the poor. Mobile banking addresses the problem of the heavy regulation and costly maintenance of saving accounts. Mobile financial services in the developing world, ahead of the developed world in this respect, could be worth $5 billion by 2012. Safaricom’s M-Pesa launched one of the first systems where a network of agents of mostly shopkeepers, instead of bank branches, would take deposits in cash and translate these onto a virtual account on customers' phones. Cash transfers can be done between phones and issued back in cash with a small commission, making remittances safer.

        Islamic view on development to alleviate poverty. In the context of the Muslim societies, building inclusive financial systems would most certainly require integration of microfinance with Islamic finance. Microfinance and Islamic finance have much in common. Both advocate  entrepreneurship and risk sharing and believe that the poor should take part in such activities; focus on the development and social goals. An Islamic microfinance system, on the other hand, has a subsystem of zakah that exclusively targets the poorest of the poor. Zakah involves an “obligation” on the rich and not-so-poor to donate a specific percentage of income and wealth for the extremely poor and the destitute defined as per clear criteria. In addition to zakah that is obligatory, Muslims are encouraged to make voluntary donations called sadaqah that are free from any constraint regarding their use. One of the potential benefits of microfinance in Muslim societies is the empowerment of Muslim women. While the ability of microfinance institutions to deliver financial services to rural women in gender-segregated  societies is commendable , working with Muslim women is a sensitive issue that often raises accusations of meddling with social codes. Some Islamic microfinance institutions seek to overcome this through a shift in their focus from “women empowerment” to “family empowerment”. In a few other Islamic microfinance programmes, a culturally appropriate way has been found of empowering women through gender-segregated ownership of the financing entity and involving separate appraisal of loan applications by women who develop their own gender-sensitive products and strategies for the future.  

REFERENCE

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty#cite_note-ANF-4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Malaysia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_development

http://islamicvoice.com/December2007/MuslimEconomy/

http://faithbasedmicrofinance.info/povertyinislam.aspx

http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/dev_pov/dev_pov.html

http://www.etu.org.za/toolbox/docs/development/poverty.html

http://www.globalissues.org/article/425/poverty-and-the-environment