Poverty. How do you define this word?
The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than $1.25 a day. More than 1.4 billion people in our world meet that definition. Even more startling, according to the Global Issues website, is that almost half of our world's population lives on less than $2.50 a day.
In a sense, it almost isn't even worth stating these statistics because, especially in the United States, it is hard, if not impossible, to even imagine what living on $2.50 a day means. It's like saying the universe is infinite. We may believe it, but we don't have the capacity to truly comprehend it.
As a member of OneWorld, a student organization dedicated to promoting action to combat global poverty, I am concerned with how we address the many issues and definitions of poverty that these strictly quantitative economic statistics reflect in today's world. Yet my goal is not to sell a new, guaranteed-to-work solution to poverty but rather to help reframe the way we think about it.
Perhaps the best way to begin crafting a plausible solution to a problem is to first understand it. Unfortunately, we often assess the problem of global poverty through a problematic lens. Most people would probably agree that trying to "fix" global poverty is too lofty, simplistic or unrealistic a goal. I would suggest that our mistake — more fundamental than unrealistic goals — is in our treatment of global poverty as a single problem when really it is an umbrella label that applies to many problems.
Global poverty is natural disasters and climate change, war, overpopulation, starvation, racism, sexism, political corruption, poor quality, quantity of education, jobs and on and on. In short, we may be more effective if we acknowledge that global poverty is a grand union of many complex and intersecting social, political and economic problems. If the single goal of poverty alleviation seems unrealistic, it may be because we are thinking about poverty in a way that does not fully address the complex reality.
In the same way that we acknowledge the variety of issues that make up poverty, we must similarly recognize that the solutions will have to be just as diverse. As The Global Development Research Center's website suggests, we must consider that even if we were able to give all the world's children an education that endows them with useful skills, many would graduate to find that their national system is not structured to provide enough well-paying jobs for all the educated people to make a decent living in society.
There can be no one catch-all solution to global poverty, because there is no one manifestation, let alone cause. And that's not all. To truly embrace complexity, we must also consider the reality of different local contexts that require the implementation of any one idea to vary by community. Indeed, while we've established that there's no one solution to global poverty, we can't assume that there exists any one solution to any one of its constituent problems either. From community to community, the same problems won't take the same solutions.
While perhaps I should apologize for presenting another piece of media that enumerates long problems with no proposed solutions, I still feel there is reason to feel emboldened, no matter how deeply paralyzingly deep and complicated these issues may seem.
We must never feel that what we can do to help fight poverty is too small. In fact, the endeavors that address issues on a small, focused community level may be the ones that make the most effective difference. When we go out into the world with the goal "to alleviate global poverty," we are rightfully humbled, realizing that we've bitten off way more than we can chew — in fact, that we've bitten off the promise to cure most of the world's problems.
At the end of the day, I would simply hope that we all find a way to combine what we love with a will to help in some way. Whether you're an educator, an entrepreneur, an engineer or something else entirely, it is not hard to find a way to apply your talents to the many needs of our time.
OneWorld is hosting a global crafts bazaar on Friday, Dec. 3, in the Mayer Campus Center to showcase some of the many opportunities to do so. Hopefully it will make your holiday shopping a little easier too. How's that for a fun and natural way to help make the world a better place?
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Louise Head is a sophomore majoring in International Letters and Visual Studies. She is a member of OneWorld.
