Our government sees poverty through the wrong lenses By Isa Ssenkumba Most African countries, Uganda inclusive swim in abject poverty. Attempts to eradicate poverty seem to be the central focus in every governments strategies but to our dismay no positive results have been registered. Either our leaders dont have the will to fight poverty or they are fighting a complex malady with wrong strategies or both. Poverty as seen through the lenses of a common mind is a situation of perpetual need for the daily necessities of life and the feeling of powerlessness to influence the things around you. It is therefore, a complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon in which the influencing factors are inter-linked and often inter-dependent. These factors include amongst others access to natural resources, human factors, financial assets, social capital and physical infrastructure. In Uganda, we have lived to see government policy draftsmen coming up with juicy and glittering policies and strategies to send poverty to hell but none of the good policies has lived to celebrate the good results. Actually the policies have turned out to be baseless, unrealistic, inapplicable and therefore short lived. The interconnectedness of the causes and effects of poverty demonstrate the frustration poor people face in moving out of poverty as the many factors produce vicious cycles of poverty. Right from the early 1990s we have seen Entandidwa Scheme, Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP), Plan for the Modernisation of Agriculture (PMA), Prosperity for All (Bonna Baggaggawale) and many others yet to come. The first challenge that comes with these programmes is that they originate from political excitements especially during campaigns and they intend to coax voters to vote overwhelmingly for the political leadership in power. Secondly, the programs are handled over to inexperienced, incompetent and corrupt officials to execute. Sometimes government cannot tell which groups of the population are more vulnerable to poverty. They end up directing these programs to the wrong groups. The women, male youths, Widows and female headed households, households with large families, casual laborers and other have always been the most vulnerable to poverty. Many dependants place a strain on the meagre household resources. It is important that when discussing the strategy to reduce poverty it is useful to categorize the poor into two groups; the destitute and the poor. The destitute are people who do not have hope, and who have no assets. They need safety net interventions and will benefit from more general interventions indirectly through improved local well-being and existing local networks. The poor on the other hand have the will and the desire to improve and sustain their livelihood, but express frustration in their attempts to do so because of limited assets, skills and knowledge , restricted access to services, infrastructure and information or social disadvantage. It is also important to realize that the poor are mainly engaged in subsistence agriculture and micro enterprises that require low capital and low levels of entrepreneurship skills. Farmers can fish themselves out of poverty by increasing commercial agricultural production. They can only do so with access to credit and financial services, improved markets, access to affordable inputs, access to improved storage and processing facilities, control of crops and livestock pests and diseases, agricultural research and training and many others. This is what government must provide. The money that government spends on its officials to go to villages to teach farmers how to space crops is wasted because it is illogical to teach farmers to space what they dont have. Farmers need seeds to plant, farming equipment like tractors, markets and not seminars. The government must also address other agricultural constraints like marketing infrastructure, technology generation and dissemination, land tenure policy, farmers organizations, on-farm and off- farm storage, human resource constraint, environmental degradation and many others. Corruption has also impeded most of the development hence poverty eradication programs. Resources that are meant to help in the fight against poverty are siphoned by a few individuals who have access to them. The vice must be fought first. Another hindrance is the over-ambitiousness of the government in formulating and implementing these programs. It is wrong to think and assure citizens that results will be seen in an overnight. When you try to run faster than your guardian angel can fly you are likely to crush. senkumbab@ymail
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 05:09:56 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015