Investing in people.

A fifth of the world's population live in absolute poverty, earning scarcely 2 per cent of the world's income. The ill-effects of this economic deprivation are often compounded by ethnic tensions and warfare, which can lead to the local displacement of people and large refugee movements. There are some 17 million refugees and 20 million displaced persons in the world today, deprived of home, health and education, their lives and livelihoods destroyed. These people add not to their nations' productivity but to their overall economic burdens.

"In the worst of instances, the survival of an entire society or nation is threatened because the essentials of life are beyond the reach of its people", concluded participants in the 46th Annual DPI/NGO Conference (8-10 September 1993, New York).

While income is the most common measure of poverty, in fact poverty is also reflected by such indicators as nutrition, life expectancy, child mortality, literacy, illness and education. More difficult to measure, but equally impoverishing of human life are insecurity due to crime or other violence, political or cultural persecution, and other limitations on basic human rights and freedoms. Most of those factors are both causes and effects of economic poverty.

In the last quarter century, statistics measuring the factors influencing poverty indicate a significant reduction in the proportion of poor people in the world. For example, health indicators showed continuous improvements in all regions, average life expectancy increased from 51 to 63 years; and primary school enrollment reached 89 per cent.

However, there have been wide regional variations: the numbers and proportion of poor people has increased in Africa, while they have decreased in East and Southeast Asia. Moreover, overall improvement in poverty-related indicators has slowed in recent years, while the number of poor people has increased, now standing at about 1.3 billion people.

Projections to the year 2000 indicate that the largest increase in that number would take place in Africa, and the gap between Africa and the rest of the world would continue to widen, noted participants in the Expert Meeting on Poverty (27-29 June, Lusaka, Zambia), the last in a triptych of meetings focusing on the core issues to be addressed by the Summit. "Unabated, the steady growth in population in the developing world would strain the capacity of the existing weak social sector ministries and dampen potential progress, particularly in many of the low-income countries".

Furthermore, stated the experts in a summary of their meeting, "growing inequalities in income distribution in developed countries are also adding new dimensions to the global poverty picture. Within many countries, gaps between men and women, between indigenous groups and the rest of the population, and between urban and rural areas are proving hard to overcome through labour intensive growth and basic investments in human resources".

Empowering the poor

A key approach to eradication lies in enabling the poor to be better off on their own terms, through changes at both the micro and macro levels that will help reach the poor and empower them to improve all aspects of their lives.

"In the short term, poverty can be reduced to some extent by redistribution, but poverty reduction is greatly facilitated when economic growth generates new resources that can be preferentially used to assist poor people", the experts stated. However, "economic growth often occurs together with increases in poverty and inequality Poverty reduction requires, therefore, not just aggregate economic growth, but economic and social policies that ensure that the benefits of growth are widely shared."

Another important area of focus during the Social Summit will be the creation of an enabling economic environment for sustainable, longterm development. This includes finding equitable, home-grown strategies for resolving the external debt crisis faced by developing countries, as well as introducing structural reforms to combat rapid inflation, large budget deficits and unsustainable patterns of demand, which have become major problems in industrialized economies.

"Greater efforts should be made to promote 'bottom-up' approaches to social development and poverty reduction rather than the more common 'top-down' approaches", according to the experts. However, they also saw the need for coordinating mechanisms at the international level, focusing on social issues to complement existing international financial, economic and trade organizations. "International efforts are required to create a more stable international economic environment in order to allow adjustment while protecting poor and vulnerable people", the experts reported.

Overall, expert discussions on strategies for reducing poverty centered on two basic objectives: labour-intensive growth, and human resources development. The combination of these objectives as the basis for poverty reduction was set forth in the World Bank's World Development Report, 1990, which saw growth as essential to reducing poverty, but also considered the pattern of growth as important as the rate of growth.

"Efficient labour-intensive growth is a key to providing jobs and raising incomes for the poor", assert the experts. "Investing in people, through education, health care, including reproductive health, and nutrition, not only improves human welfare directly, but is also a sound investment."

RELATED ARTICLE: Poverty: The proposals

The Preparatory Committee's 31 August progress report suggests that Governments commit "to the goal of eradicating poverty in the world, in the shortest period possible, by decisive national actions and international cooperation, as a moral and political imperative of humankind."

To that end, States should:

* Commit to formulating national, specific, time-bound commitments to eliminating extreme poverty;

* Focus efforts and policies on the satisfaction of basic needs for all with regard to food security and the elimination of malnutrition, primary health care and voluntary family planning, safe drinking water and sanitation, universal primary education, adequate shelter and access to information and knowledge;

* Review national budgets and adjust them to meet, on a priority basis, these basic needs;

* Develop and implement policies for ensuring that all people have adequate economic and social protection during unemployment, ill health, child-rearing, disability and old age; and

* Give special priority to the needs of women and children.

* At the international level, States "shall remove all impediments to the attainment of this commitment in a sustained manner and ensure that all international institutions, particularly the multilateral development banks, assist developing countries and other countries in need of their efforts towards the achievement of our overall goal of eliminating poverty and ensuring basic social protection"

RELATED ARTICLE: Social Development: The statistics

Poverty is widespread

* Worldwide, 1 out of every 5 people--more than 1 billion in all--live below the poverty line, and an estimated 13 million to 18 million die annually of poverty-related causes.

* The ranks of those suffering extreme poverty will quadruple within one lifetime if current economic and demographic trends continue.

* Entire nations are afflicted; developing country debt is staggering. At $1.4 trillion, it is nearly double that of a decade ago. Servicing this debt means a net cash outflow from South to North and slashed social budgets which mean that the poorest in society bear the brunt of the burden.

Productive employment is decreasing

* One out of every 10 people of working age cannot find work that pays a decent wage;

* Of the world's total wage earners, 21 per cent receive only 2 per cent of the world's income.

* Worldwide, about 40 per cent of rural women work on their families: farms without wages. Even when paid, they earn far less than men for the same work.

Societies are disintegrating

* Conflict--a symptom of disintegration--has claimed more than 20 million lives since 1945. Over the last decade, conflicts within countries have increased: of the 82 armed conflicts between 1989 and 1992, 79 were domestic many along ethnic lines; 90 per cent of casualties were civilian.

* Conflict also produces refugees and forced migration. In 1993 alone, a total of 6.8 million refugees fled three countries: Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia and Mozambique.

* Reported crime has grown at a worldwide average of 5 per cent since the 1980s; in the United States alone, there are 35 million crimes committed annually. Escalation of crime has been particularly swift in developing countries and in countries in transition. Russia, for example, was beset by more than 5,600 gangs in 1994, almost 10 times more than in 1990.

* Illegal drug trafficking rakes in profits of some $500 billion a year--a sum equal to the combined gross national products of two thirds of the UN Member States put together.

* Public corruption is becoming commonplace. In some countries, financial frauds are estimated to cost the equivalent of 10 per cent of the country's annual gross domestic product.

Changing course

The problems are planetary and must be addressed in a global context. The UN has responded by calling for the Worid Summit for Social Development, in order to formulate a truly global strategy to combat the intertwined crisis of poverty, unemployment and social disintegration. This key event is one of a sequence of eight Un-sponsored conferences, part of a decade devoted to development. It closely follows the Secretary-General's "An Agenda for Development", which views social development as imperative to international security. Seen in this context, the Summit is the centrepiece of the Un's commitment to put development and social issues at the top of the international agenda.