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’Return to the basics, look at individual needs’ |
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Posted by Haniza Talha
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Tuesday, 15 January 2008 00:53 |
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IF you have an income but do not have a clinic nearby, you are still poor.
This is the view of renowned economist Prof Jeffrey Sachs, who spent two days in the northern regions of Sabah to see for himself the efforts undertaken to alleviate poverty.
“I like a needs-based assessment approach to poverty. If you have an income but somehow you don’t have electricity, you are still poor,” he said. “A lot of what is needed to get out of poverty is at community level, or the public service level, and not simply measured by the household income.
“So I’d rather evaluate whether individuals and their households have access to the things they need to meet their basic needs, and this includes their personal income and availability of public services.”
Sachs, who is the first holder of the Royal Professor Ungku Aziz Chair at the Centre for Poverty and Development Studies in Universiti Malaya, said there had been progress in Sabah but it was not enough.
He said while poverty rates had dropped significantly over the last 40 years, a low-level plateau had been reached in the last decade.
“Other states continued to have a decline in poverty rates but in Sabah, that seems not to have been the case,” Sachs said when summarising the roundtable dialogue in Kota Kinabalu.
“So growth occurred, but it was not sufficiently pro-poor and this bears better understanding. Included in that is that it has come with a depletion of resources and often neglect of poor and indigenous communities.
“Clearly, progress has been hindered, or affected by demography, by in-migration and by high natural population growth rates.”
Sachs, who is special adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, said a special feature in Sabah was its porous borders and high migration which required analysis of their impact on poverty rates and population dynamics in the state.
“There is something special here about an economy that attracts so many migrants. In terms of what that means of how growth translates into reduced poverty rates has to be understood as a special condition of Sabah.”
Based on data from the Department of Statistics, 24.8 per cent, or almost a quarter of Sabah’s three million population in 2005 comprised non-citizens. Bumiputeras make up 60.7 per cent, followed by the Chinese at 9.7 per cent and others at 4.8 per cent.
Sachs said based on what he had observed, there seemed to have been an agreement from the floor on the importance of community-driven poverty reduction strategies.
“It means empowerment of the community rather than handing over money to the community, challenging the community for its own leadership, focusing on long-term skills building in the community and identifying local needs and potential.
“There has to be cultural sensitivity and attention has to be given to environmental sustainability, especially with communities that find their natural resources taken away from them by more powerful outside interests.”
Another point that Sachs made was the role of partnerships in development programmes, saying successful development required more than a single unit as a driving force.
He said NGOs were today playing a big role and that companies now subscribed to corporate social responsibility.
“If they say they make diagnostic equipment, we say let’s have some for our clinics. The best thing a company can do is to share its expertise and technology instead of just giving money. They can help with needs, such as providing audits.” NST
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