What is poverty? What does it look like? What would it take to pull out of it, for the individual or eradicate it for whole communities?
At a very basic level the poor man cannot sustain himself. He
cannot take care of the basics – food, shelter, clothing to a satisfactory degree.
From a purely material standpoint the poor person has little or no income to
speak of.
Going by that, getting an income has to be the first thing
to look into.
A poor society is characterized by much the same, the only
difference being it is scaled up to cover many individuals, many families, many
communities. For communities you would still have to raise individual incomes
but in addition ease access to market.
The 11th European Development
Fund (EDF), which run from 2014 to 2021 sought to address this question among some
selected communities around Uganda. The €578m
(sh2.2trillion) fund has bankrolled 120 projects and focused on transport, food
security and agriculture.
While handouts can give the temporary and artificial effect
of improved income, to increase income sustainably, one has to increase their
value to the society. You do that by adding to your knowledge and experience. In
the video above the turnaround in Laurence Kayeswa’s life from petty criminal
to in-demand tailor is an apt illustration.
He learnt how to be a tailor, a skill clearly valued in and
around he slums of Bwaise going by the success he has had in building a steady,
reliable income, that he uses to support himself and family.
It may be of added advantage to teach him some business
skills, that would help scale up his enterprise, serve more people and earn him
more money. But for now, he is out of poverty and as a minimum target this was
achieved.
The farmers of Mount Elgon Coffee and Honey Cooperative were
an interesting example of how communities can be transformed. Already coffee
farmers by the time an EU affiliated project the Market Access Upgrade Porgram
(MARKUP), knocked on their door, its probable that they were only just making ends meet.
Under the program the coffee farmers were not only helped
improve their farms, through improved coffee husbandry methods but were also
encouraged to keep bees to improve their coffee farms and as anew revenue stream.
But beyond that, the project organized them into a
cooperative that allows them to negotiate better terms from suppliers, bulk
their produce and even add value. Value addition should mean the farmer would
get a greater proportion of the shelf price for his crop.
User-owned cooperatives, if managed properly are an effective
means of ensuring producers get a fair shake from the market. Many
times our poverty is a function of our inability to aggregate our resources, be it land, labour or capital.
Similar benefits were seen among the cocoa farmers in
Bundibugyo where MARKUP is present.
It is still early days to assess the long-term impact of
these initiatives on their respective communities -- there are still thieves
coming out of Bwaise and poverty continues to ravage the slopes of Mount Egon
and Bundibugyo, but the basic principles are sound.
The EDF has done another important thing for these
communities, creating examples from which the communities can learn. By designing
the individuals and farmer organisations to stand alone, it is likely that the projects
cannot only be self-sustaining but can be self-perpetuating in the surrounding
societies.
It will be interesting to return to these individuals ten-,
20-years from now and see what has become of them. We may be pleasantly surprised.
