WHAT IS POVERTY?

Yes, What Is Poverty?

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            Sounds a bit odd isn’t, asking an ‘easy question’ Of course poverty can easily be described depending on who you ask and in what condition you ask them. A common response might be that poverty is the absence of sufficient money, or inability to provide basic human needs, or in a national level-when the average citizen barely survives through the day. These answers might stand and instead of featuring the many responses we can get from asking people, what exactly is poverty? What has the world collectively been doing to combat poverty? Whose responsibility is it to eradicate poverty? Was any nation born rich? These are just a few questions circling around the term poverty and some people have tried to measure poverty with the hope that if the right measurement is gotten, that a formula can be sprouted around it to attempt curbing poverty. The outcome of those measurements hasn’t really been doing much or at least doesn’t seem to be addressing the real problem, so what is or more importantly what causes poverty. One important thing i'd want us to take away from this piece is that "Poverty is not the lack of resources."

            Poverty can appear in any scale ranging from a nation to a continent to a human being even to the knowledge bank of that individual. When someone does not have the sufficient knowledge to give him or her the desired result one is seeking, it will be true to say that that 'someone' is bankrupt of some kind of information. So someone can be abundant in health but financially not capable, abundant in healthy human relationships but poor when it comes to academic relationships, one can be spiritually capable but not have the prerequisite knowledge to transfer what is in his or her spirit to the natural, so that someone is spiritually not poor, but still not physically rich. So poverty can be viewed from divers angle but for the purpose of this piece, we are going to focus on poverty with regards to a society's well being even unto the individual in that society. Almost all the sources I checked for the meaning of poverty seemed to be circling around the idea that poverty is the lack of resources maybe financial resources or infrastructural resources and some defined it as not having enough material possessions or income for a person’s need or the inability of a person or a nation to meet up to a basic standard of living. Again "Poverty is not the lack of resources."

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            Every year, hundreds of billions around the globe is dedicated to poverty eradication (Fig 1.3) and taking an overview on the statistics, the plan seems to be working. The global percentage rate has fallen from 35% in the 1990s to around 10% in the early 2000s' according to World bank. But when the percentage rate is spread out on a more specific rate, you’ll see that a particular part of the world is growing way faster than the other. (Fig 1.4) Asia has been one of the continents though still poor but has been among the continents that has been on a high way out of poverty and so far so good, Africa has not. China over the past few decades has been rapidly lifting many out of poverty. Now one would argue that this is because of the provisions of infrastructures and governments giving out loans or grants or aids meaning that the single reason why some countries in the African continent like Nigeria has been slow to join the train over the long run could be because of the lack of infrastructures and basic amenities, while this can be factored in there is a challenge; if the government decides to build two large supermarkets at the corner of a village, or a standard school, or a well equipped hospital, do you think that those kinds of high end services can be afforded by the villagers? I don’t think so, because the response to such community isn’t tons of overnight tall and beautiful infrastructures. Don’t get me wrong, those kinds of infrastructures are very helpful but wouldn't by itself all of a sudden urbanize an area or improve their standard of living.

Fig 1.4

                    Fig 1.5 shows the rate of poverty in some African countries in 1960s Vs 2015.

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            According to the above graph, it seems we are getting poorer by the day despite having more infrastructures and accessible basic amenities in these same areas that has recorded a lower GDP per capita in recent times, even when the governments keeps proposing mega projects that is aimed to lift many out of joblessness to the extension of improving the living standard of many, how come we are only getting poorer with these? It could be that we have been approaching the means of poverty eradication the wrong way, like solving an equation with the wrong formula and hoping to arrive at the answer somehow. If you look at the wealthy nations today, it is easy to think they all started like that, some of those countries we admire today have been involved in many external wars and we know the impact wars can have in a country both on the winning and loosing side, yet they are still more prosperous than most African countries that has only handled a civil war. (Don’t get me wrong, civil war is no joke) When you study the prosperous countries today from where they started to where they are now, it'd seem a similar method was applied whether consciously or not by them to catapult themselves from having a lower standard of living to where they are now today and that is "Providing solutions to practical problems--Innovation."

 Innovation

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            Innovation can be argued to be the most single reason why once upon a time poor nation is seen today as wealthy and prosperous. Infrastructures in a nation where majority can not afford the services the infrastructures are going to bring is not going to do much in improving their standard of living so the solution to curbing the poverty rate of a country is not building another bridge or improving the landscape rather investing in the areas that will birth innovative minds. What we need to be doing is investing time and money in trying to find a way to make products that fits the context of a broad society, in essence trying to solve a problem and whoever be it a nation or citizen that can sustain this kind of mindset will pull resources towards it. This is because "Innovation comes before the resources." For instance, you find a way to better teach University students on subjects that really matter to them or you find a better means of transportation to help ease up on the traffic, and you decide to start a company around your wonderful idea, what will happen is that on the maturity of that innovative idea, people will start relocating to your locality for the chances of getting a job, real estate companies will start building houses for incoming residents, a standard hospital sprouts because now with these good paying jobs people can afford its services and still be able to sustain their family, all these things and many more starts happening just because you innovated. Now imagine when when we have millions and millions of such scenarios. So prosperity and its resources doesn’t come in to any society before innovation, rather it is the other way round and this is why you see that some cities are more prosperous than others. The more innovative a person, society, nation, or region is, the more qualified they are for prosperity.

Fig 2.2

            (The figures used in this paragraph could vary depending on the site you refer to, but you will get the point) To put things into perspective and this is by no means to intimidate any region rather to challenge it. As at when this piece was been put together, the State of California in the USA has its nominal GDP at $3.2t with the population of 39 million people, now the largest economy in Africa in terms of GDP which is Nigeria has its nominal GDP at about $430.916b with the population of over 200 million people. In another case we have the United States, with its nominal GDP at $20.54t with a population of app 329 million people in comparison with the African nations with their combined nominal GDP of $2.8t according to wikipedia with the population of app 1.3b. To put all these in plain English, California as a state is more innovative than all African countries combined while USA as a country is more innovative than Africa as a continent by at least 10 times. Is that not something worth thinking about? That you will need 10 individual African continents to match up to one country in North America?

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            This alone should fuel you into proper placements of real priorities. Population, race height, background or any of those mediums of measurements doesn’t have anything to do with prosperity. All you need is a man, you might not even need a functioning mind, just get a man/woman and work on their minds until it produces something really valuable, that mind can be yours if you decide today to work on your mind. "You can check out this link Ways to nurture your mind for more details." These countries aren’t better than Nigeria or any other African nation just because they are with more opportunities, they just do the things that can be done by anyone in any context which is providing solutions that are applicable on a large scale and replenish the world with the same solution, so while some countries are looking for how to cut corners and set up uncompleted infrastructures to combat poverty, someone on the other part of the world is thinking on the next big solution or innovation, and because innovation is about to be born, resources starts relocating. So for almost every technological, political, sociological etc solution we need, we deploy resources into these countries to get them hence enriching them even more. One of the ways we justify this is by saying that the government officials are not working and while that is a fact, is it really the only reason why such is prevalent?

Governments Cannot Shoulder All The Blame

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            In our society, mostly on the African continent, the government has on the most part been an easy target for its citizens on cases like under development issues and poor living standards for its people. Due to the general corrupt practices that finds expression in the way these government positions are handled, someone can not be wrong for pointing fingers at them, nevertheless, in some cases the role of the government in most developing countries is reactive. Meaning they don’t really kick start the prosperity journey. Is it part of their duty? Yes, but government officials are not known to be the most innovative set of people so expecting such from them might take a while and that 'while' might introduce our children into the world and even our children's children to join us in our current situation and it should not be so. The conventional course is that a citizen innovates around a sector and then can expect a governmental back up per say to follow if need be and if in your case just like many others doesn't work out that way, you are not expected to give up, innovate around your innovation and move forward! A time was when cars were a thing only the super rich could afford, but a man by the name Henry Ford thought about commercializing it and while people laughed at him, just as there would be people that will mock you too when you decide to innovate, but only that line of action by Ford birthed many opportunities that boosted the entire community. By building manufacturing plants, he needed more workers and partners and managers creating more jobs than they were before that time. Again "Innovation precedes prosperity" and not the other way round. Some data research on some of the most prosperous countries reveals that these countries due to external strife with another country were actually in worse conditions than most African nations and the reason why they were able to transition to where they are today is not because of their skin color but because they found practical solutions to practical problems. The level of growth China has seen in the last decade shows that Africa’s problem isn’t lack of resources, but lack of innovation. Most services or products in any form used on the continent practically needs to cross the oceans to be here, and the ones that are locally made or sourced, either its raw materials or tools for making it or delivering it to the consumer were imported. Africa and its amazing nations is not filled with backward thinkers who are plagued with a slavery mindset, we for the most part just don't want to be concerned with these lines of thoughts, but that has to change if we are to see Africa in its full glory. This is not to say that Africa and its nations doesn’t have anything going for it, really cool and innovative products and services has been invented on African soil, tech start-ups are fast becoming a familiar term, innovations around energy conservation, agriculture, transportation etc are slowly taking its place on the continent but at the long run it seems these innovations are not celebrated on the world stage. I don’t know many persons outside the continent or even on the continent driving a car manufactured in Africa or using a phone made in an African nation. They can pick it up out of sympathy and admire it and give all kinds of speech about it, once they are done, they drop it and switch on their Samsung or iPhone or buy a Mercedes. Politicians don’t even patronize their home hospitals but in all this, the land is not barren. Africa is over filled with potentials and it is ripe for harnessing.

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Probable Reasons

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            Some of the reasons why we have not innovated much could include bad government, zero line of mentor-ship because since the previous generation and the ones before that didn’t do much around innovation on a global scale, when you want to innovate, it could be perceived as you trying to break out of line because the normal line has always been go to school, get good grades so you can get good job, another reason could be our obsession with these countries, we want to go there, eat their foods, experience their weather and because we are so focused on these countries on where they are now, we often forget where they started from. No country was founded rich and prosperous, and these can be very hard to imagine because after we see them on TVs and blogs and movies and news, we see all these beautiful buildings decorating their skylines and all these seemingly happy people walking their dogs in a very beautiful safe park, we look on ours and think there is no hope and there is nothing that can be done to fix our standard of living and at the most part we believe that if by any means we can build or have those same constructions and social amenities that we see on the internet that we are going to be or appear more prosperous but unfortunately as we have come to see, that is not the reality.

Conclusion

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            Innovation being a route out of poverty doesn’t need to be very spectacular you see, the end goal of any innovation should be to make a product or services of real value, a product or service that is efficient and affordable and at the long run create jobs and enhance the living standards of the people. So a better approach to trying to make a nation and its citizens improve their standards of living is by encouraging innovation. It is important that we consider this, and Africa being Africa is ripe for prosperity. No matter your career line or passion there are tons of opportunities for innovation. So we should not be focusing on winning the next lottery or expecting a magic wand to suddenly make our lives better rather we should be focusing on how to solve a solution. We are to come together and harness our individual gifts, despising quick means to impact and embracing and trusting the process. What then is innovation? Click on INNOVATION to find out more on how you can go about innovation.