Tag: Poverty

China excels through simple attitudes

Posted on By Sino Uganda Research Centre

By Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi

I recently travelled to Beijing to participate in the 3rd Conference on Dialogue Between Chinese and African Civilizations organized by the China Africa Institute (CAI).

In preparation for the conference, the organizers asked what topic I would prefer to discuss. I chose to contribute to the one on promoting Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) cooperation by sharing development experience between China and Africa. This is because, as a recent graduate, I have reflected deeply on the most significant ways I can contribute to my country and the African continent and resolved that it’s through adding to our capacities for economic development and social transformation.  This conference provided me an opportunity to contribute knowledge and also learn from other experts and scholars on development, especially around the world’s biggest development finance initiative by comrade Xi Jinping- the BRI.

I moderated a panel of knowledgeable persons including Prof. Zhang Zhenke, the Director and Professor of the Center for African Studies at Nanjing University; Prof. Yusufu Ali Zoaka, who teaches Policy Analysis and Development Studies at the University of Abuja in Nigeria; Mr. Wang Yongzhong, the Director and Research Fellow at the International Commodities Division of the Institute of World Economics and Politics (IWES) at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS); Prof. Leon-Marie Nkolo Ndjodo of the University of Maroua in Cameroon and Prof. Wang Qilong, the Changjiang Scholar of the Ministry of Education in China and Vice President and Professor at Xi’an International Studies University, among other experts.

After the conference, we flew from Beijing to Fujian Province in South Eastern China. There we drove by road from Fuzhou city to Ningde city, up to Xiaqi village- a boat dwellers settlement which boasts the successes of poverty alleviation in Ningde city.

It was easier on this trip to be overwhelmed by the majesty of infrastructure projects undertaken by the Chinese government, which most first-time travellers from developing countries feel when they visit developed countries. I was also impressed but not by the greatness of the state of China as experienced through such projects, rather by the sheer dedication, discipline and meticulous detail of every Chinese peasant and elite while doing their work.

For thousands of miles across cities and country roads, one sees that every building, every walkway, every street and every tree along the road has been cared for and maintained with religious dedication.

It is easier for the government to oversee imposing projects such as the long bridges across rivers and lakes or the tunnels through mountains to ease road transport. But the hardest thing to achieve is to instill discipline in every citizen to maintain these works.

No government has the reach let alone the grasp to compel a billion people to avoid vandalism, or littering, or to obey traffic rules or clean their homes. In fact, police officers and soldiers were absent from the public. Everyone in these cities enforces discipline by themselves without the vivid coercion and gun-wielding we see in Kampala. I last saw a gun at Entebbe International Airport and the first thing I saw as I disembarked from the plane to access the airport terminal on my return was a submachine gun wielded by a police officer! One wonders how and why a society so obsessed with coercing order as Uganda is, remains so disorganized.

I pondered deeply about order and public hygiene because I realized that it is one of the things a society can have regardless of the functionality of the government. We can blame the government for bad roads, but who shall we blame for failing to make our beds? Or failing to keep away from grass in public spaces? Or failing to dump rubbish in dustbins? Or failing to obey traffic rules?

Many things can make a society function regardless of whether the government has money to provide public goods and services, or whether it is corrupt. These are the things that impressed me most about China. These simple attitudes among its people.

Xiaqi village is one of the most backward places in China. It has peasants who were homeless boat-dwellers thirty years ago. Although one may be impressed by the poverty alleviation undertaken by the government of China in resettling them into decent housing and availing them of social services, I was mostly impressed by their order. Every household has at least two dustbins. The dustbins looked cleaner than they were expected to be. There was not a single piece of litter in their backyards. Not even a cigarette residue. Every flower tree along the roads from this village up to Ningde city looked tendered for with peerless attention. And the roads seemed to be mopped daily. But it’s all because everyone cares not to litter and everyone maintains public facilities in good shape.

No government has the capacity to oversee such dedication and discipline among its citizens to achieve this level of civilization. And citizens needn’t wait for the government of their choice to take personal initiative to tidy up their environment or maintain the few public facilities available. To me, this was the most impressive development in China. And we do not need China’s GDP to attain such social order in Uganda.

nnandakizito@dwcug.org

The author is a senior research fellow, Development Watch Centre.

Four Decades and 800M People Out of Poverty: Lessons From China’s Poverty Alleviation Approach

Posted on By Sino Uganda Research Centre

George Musiime

At the dawn of African independence, Kwame Nkrumah is quoted to have said “Seek ye first the political Kingdom and all else shall be added unto you.” However, as reality has proved to us, whereas political freedom might have been a necessary condition for Africa’s economic freedom, some analysts contend that this was not necessarily a sufficient condition for economic freedom. Economic freedom takes rigorous and meticulous efforts and something has been lacking in the post independence-African effort. Evidence of this is the persistence of poverty as a major challenge faced by all African like many other states in the global south to date.

On the contrary, one nation that has been able to make massive progress in as far as stamping out poverty is concerned is China. The People’s Republic of China stands tall above all as a nation that has managed to lift out of extreme poverty nearly 800 Million Chinese over the past 40 years. To put this into context, this is the equivalent of 54% of Africa’s total population today or 20 Million people out of poverty each year over the past 40years. Even, the World Bank has credited China with a contribution of almost three quarters to total global poverty reduction, but how was China able to do this? A simple answer to this Question according to president Xi Jinping is;  Based on China’s unique national conditions and following the law of poverty reduction, China adopted a series of extraordinary policies and measures, and constructed a whole set of systems covering policy, work and institutions, which blazed a poverty reduction path forming an anti-poverty theory with Chinese characteristics.

Otherwise, what would the idea of shared prosperity mean on the global stage if it did not hold true at home? This is why China first sought shared prosperity for its own people.  Particularly, in the fight against poverty, the country is a beacon of hope for ending global poverty; one the rest of the world needs to emulate. According to President Xi, a key mission of the Communist Party of China is to eradicate poverty, improve people’s living standards, and gradually achieve common prosperity for all. In fact, if Africa and the rest of the world seek inspiration, there is no better or more credible source of inspiration than China when it comes to poverty eradication.

The Chinese poverty alleviation campaign employed a two-pronged approach focusing on stimulating economic growth through deliberately driving economic transformation and the creation of new opportunities especially for the poor members of society. Additionally, the government undertook direct initiatives with a bias towards disadvantaged areas with an underlying lack of access to opportunities but also focusing on poor and vulnerable households all across the board. This is a different approach to rolling out blanket-universal poverty alleviation programs without necessarily identifying the nature and context of people that need to be helped out of poverty. This coupled with well-developed infrastructure and developed human capital catapulted China to the attainment of the goal of eradicating poverty by the year 2020.

A key fundamental of this approach is realizing that national level poverty manifestation is always going to be the cumulative outcome of poverty at the individual level, household level, and community level all the way up to the national level. This is why president Xi, while speaking in the northern province of Hebei in 2012 declared the need for well-focused measures to help country-men facing difficulties out of poverty. This would follow from understanding the situation of every poor citizen, and every household in China, through a series of steps starting from Awareness campaigns, application reviews, door-to-door investigations, deliberate disclosures at the village level, examination of disclosures at the township level and eventual approval at the national level. This meticulous trickle-down procedure intended to weed out “fake beneficiaries” allowing all efforts to be directed at the most deserving members of society.

To accomplish this, the government assembled and deployed Poverty alleviation cadres all across the nation. Moreover, critical to the poverty alleviation effort was maintaining a database of all impoverished households keeping data such as; identification and evaluation data, causes of poverty, assistance plans, incomes and expenditures of impoverished households, policies and guarantees received, relevant agreements,  et cetera . This data not only helped with targeting interventions based on the unique situation of the poor households but also with both evaluation of effectiveness of the approaches as well as ensuring people do not slip back into poverty once they have been liberated through monitoring and hence sustaining the gains of the nation’s poverty alleviation efforts.

As countries looking to help our people out of poverty, we like China at the onset might have made significant gains on the fronts of investment in infrastructure and human capital, however, we are lacking when it comes to deeper understanding of our people, the causes of their poverty et cetera. The Makerere University, college of humanities and social sciences for example identifies, health challenges, unemployment, lack of access to productive resources such as land, credit and market information as the leading causes of persistent poverty. These causes are not universally crosscutting thus there is no one size-fits-all measure of poverty alleviation. To use the words of president Xi, the design of poverty alleviation programs should be based on the unique conditions of the intended beneficiaries.  For example, the development of labor-intensive industries to absorb skilled unemployed labor force, skilling campaigns for those poor due to a lack of the necessary skills for the available job market, providing market incentives to spur production hence creating competitive labor markets et cetera: an approach where we addressed each unique instance of poverty through its own unique intervention. Unless we develop a deeper understanding of the nature and context of the problem we seek to address, we may still struggle to attain economic freedom for our people.

George Musiime is a research fellow at the Sino-Uganda Research Centre.

 

Parish Development Model: Lessons from China’s Poverty Alleviation initiatives

Posted on By Sino Uganda Research Centre

By Alan Collins Mpewo

 

Poverty is a concept not alien to any human that has graced the communities that have since covered the globe. From many corners of earth, in the days of the past, and some (corners of earth) presently, resources were owned and controlled communally. This gave off the position that everyone that stood as a beneficiary for any of the subject resource(s) would stand at an equal footing in the sense of ownership and control, without anyone exceeding the set confines. Transition saw the birth of barter trade, as a mode of exchange, dispose of, and acquisition. Better means (as some will argue) later got introduced. Cowrie shells, beads, iron pellets, carefully cut fabric, and more, as the medium of trade. Finally, the currency as we know it came about – paper money. It has been projected to be the longest standing medium of exchange and trade that may have to be used for a few generations ahead, compared to those it replaced. In the same context, organization systems (notwithstanding their pros and cons) have been picked out for each separate societies, with capitalism being the most widespread. Incidentally, the control of equity and wealth are in a circle of a few individuals, and majority taste the bite of poverty at different levels.

Consequently, the various governments globally always come up with initiatives to reduce the poverty levels whose understanding has been tied around a metric system that determines the poverty line, depending on the changes of economies. Uganda has (and had) various programs established for that cause. Some notable ones have been the “Bona bagagawale, Entandikwa, NAADS, Operation Wealth Creation, Emyooga” and now “Parish Development Model.” However, the challenges and consequential failures for all the programs have similar traits. But are lessons ever picked? Dangers of face-lifting a project on the cosmetic outlook can only do so much in a short time. Underlying factors therefore don’t merely come as of lack of the will for a general change in mechanisms, but remains a mystery for political capital only aimed at a specific point of time. The parish development model for example was unveiled with a fairly switched modus operandi, but the results don’t lie. As time has sailed away, the problems that in many ways led to the demise of its predecessors, may if not remedied, write a similar story for it in time not so far away.

Countries globally have had similar initiatives to lower poverty levels, although sometimes it’s merely a showcase for political capital. The major focus of this opinion is focused on similar policies by China. It’s only fair to determine how China’s initiatives have scored, and being categorized as one of the fastest growing economies of this century, vis-à-vis Uganda’s. About 40 years ago, China had one of the highest poverty levels per aggregate population having millions of its citizens surviving on as low as $1.9 per day. How the script got a parallel chapter spares many lessons for willing countries to choose. The opening of extensive economic transformation and targeted support were the two game changers. For obvious reasons, the will against the fight against corruption and the sociopolitical system also played great roles. It realized the urgency of minimizing economic gaps between various regions in order to have a supportive economic balance before embarking on radical changes. Average economies saw their uplift through systemic tracking of development and accountability. Sustainability was foundational. Building infrastructure on all levels of community organization to withstand changes in the economy and political environment.

Uganda just like many other African countries have mastered the art of short time achievements. Empowerment isn’t considered as the political ideologies are mainly built around dependency on those in higher positions of society, than empowerment. China understood that concept and the results speak for themselves. There are uncountable local entrepreneurs that not only have dealings within China, but also across the globe. For a country with the world’s greatest population, pulling off such an achievement isn’t a small feat. Uganda needs to first set its governance priorities straight on all levels of administration. Key indicators have it that even the distributed finances for the various projects barely meet their target recipients. Such administration gaps are one of the greatest setbacks. Just like China, poverty alleviation should be on an equal from of all sectors, because the intersection among them is interdependence. Without proper infrastructure, trade is slower. Without proper governance, economic transformation is a myth. Without proper healthcare, labor productivity is lowest. Without improved ICT, industrialization is minimal. Without government support of local entrepreneurship, traditional commercialization becomes riskier to invest in. A broken education system will have society at great loses in all sectors.

The bare minimum should then be in strategizing as China and other fast-growing economies did, and establishing new and focused priorities of transformation. Otherwise, the statistics on poverty levels in Uganda haven’t been shining any bright light in the past two decades, to date.

Alan Collins Mpewo is a Senior Research Fellow, Development Watch Centre