Poverty is one world issue that has become so mainstream that people think it’s a cliché to actually resolve it. We ask ourselves: how on earth can we banish poverty when it exists even in rich countries? There are countless institutions and NGOs that have been fighting this issue for years, yet there are still many who haven’t been reached. There must be something wrong, mustn’t it? What could be wrong, then?
Poverty is about capability, Iwan Jaya Azis once said in a lecture. It is about whether or not people are capable of ensuring their own health, getting proper food, having somewhere proper to live at, and other fundamental needs. All of these are accumulated into a term called the poverty line, which is the most common measure on poverty. Each country has its own standard, and whoever is below this line is considered as poor. Unintentionally, in a way, this measure has limited our view about what’s happening with the real poverty: not everyone with low income are poor and not all unexposed areas lack, what we think as a more urbanized society, the standard of proper.
Let us take a closer look at a personal experience. A woman selling Ondel-Ondel miniature in a very limited store at Setu Babakan thinks that she does not lack any fundamental needs. She thinks that she’s doing fine in buying needs and she only has a few difficulties. This goes without saying that for a more developed society, what she is capable of obtaining does not measure up to her family’s needs. When she was asked why she does not plan on expanding her business, she said, “I only had a bicycle back then and now I have a motorcycle. I could only rent a room for the whole family back then, and now I can rent a house. This is enough for us, as we do not need to seek for fortune”.
What differs our thought from hers is that we compare one family to other families in different places, while she was comparing herself from time to time, about what she had and what she has now, what she couldn’t afford then and what she could afford in the present. She thinks in a time series range, while we think more comparatively in spatial terms. That is exactly how she doesn’t regard herself as someone living in poverty. The truth for this woman is that, similar to some people who live below the poverty line, she’s not as powerless as we think she is.
This kind of mindset is actually positive for two reasons. First, the sense of sufficiency, of not being possessed by materialistic objects, could lead to a better goal in their life. Their focus shall stay in how they will conserve their community and environment and make the best out of it. Second, it creates some kind of solitary mentality of their own being that must be followed by supporting life instruments such as better access to health clinic, education, and sanitation that will push them to the awareness of the importance of enhancing their quality of life.
This too shall shift our way of thinking about and working against poverty. Today we are focusing more on how we can lift up the poor, while what we should really be our goal is how to enhance their quality of life. This makes a huge difference, especially when we talk about the approach. Lifting up the poor means giving aid to what they think they’re lacking. Like gifts, it is an instant solution with a short-term effect. The side effect of this action is that they will eventually ask for more, because they think that this is the help they deserve. It will lead to the same mentality for the upcoming generation: they would offer their hands facing up and ask.
The better approach would be to light up the spark to the importance of having better quality of life through determining the problem happening in their community and trying to solve it for, at least, a longer term. Allowing them to define their own problem will raise their sense of belonging, and trigger them to find solutions and practice it instead of complaining.
At this point, the government should empower the regional government branches, so that they can solve problems endemic to their own regions with their own resources. In Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, this has been done. The main emerging problem they face would be providing energy in rural areas. To solve this, they are combining solar power and cellphones to create not only affordable solar panel. This method also calculates installments adjusted to the use of the energy, and thus the amount of money that they can pay gradually over time, using mobile banking. As a result, more than 200,000 homes are now electrified.
Projects like this are the concrete way of sparking up the sense of better quality of life, that they are the one solution for themselves. The second thing the government should do is to construct creative bottom-up policies instead of top-down ones. Grand platforms are proven to be ineffective because it fails to capture the sensitivity of intangible matters, such as human characteristics and social matters that exists in most rural areas. Bottom-up policies will not only allow them to acknowledge the core problem, but also empower them to solve their own problems. Financing will be subjected to specific projects in solving the problems.
By: Carissa Hanjani (Ilmu Ekonomi 2014 | Staff Kajian Kanopi 2015)
