Poverty and Sustainable Development

Ashok Khosla

Over the past five decades of so-called “international development”, the debate on poverty has
been long on rhetoric but short on effective praxis.
If the world’s governments had wished to remove poverty, they could have done so many
decades back. Poverty continues to exist because it is needed. The current social structures
and production system cannot function without it. It does not need a Karl Marx to see that.
The old shiboleths that “you have to have a pie before you can divide it,” that “it is necessary to
create wealth first and let trickle done later” and that “the poor are lazy, shiftless people” and “if
you leave things to the market, everybody’s needs will be taken care of”, are now fully
discredited. They are no longer credible even to a US President.
Poverty cannot be removed without sustainable development and sustainable development
cannot be achieved where there is poverty. Poverty in the Third World is actually not very difficult
to overcome. It requires no more than a few, simple, direct interventions, all of which are
affordable by even the poorest governments. A small fraction of their resources and the
international funding often used for other purposes will suffice. For the immediate here and now,
large numbers of remunerative jobs - universal, sustainable livelihoods - can be created. While
conventional development strategies make such jobs at costs of $ 100,000 and more (in power
stations, refineries, ports and harbours, cement plants, etc.), it is equally possible to create
individual jobs at costs of $ 100 to $ 1000 in local occupations for the local markets. They also
enhance the productivity and amenity of the resource base, as well as individual self worth.
Just as immediate a need, but with impact in the medium term is the access to availability of low
cost shelter, drinking water, sanitation and other basic facilities. This can be achieved using
existing technologies and methods appropriately adapted to site and culture. Their economic and
social costs can be brought down by factors of two and more from their present levels. The third
need, as immediate as the first two but with a slightly longer term impact, is universal primary
education. Every child in the world has a right to learn, but a learning a very different from the
current one which alienates young citizens from their cultural and natural surroundings. Achieving
these goals will certainly require political “will”. More important, it will require a political “wish”.
The interventions that need to be made by Third World governments, donor agencies and
international community include:

1. Direct action projects that lead to sustainable livelihoods.

2. Technologies, and the innovation and delivery systems needed to deploy them, aimed at
fulfilling basic needs - particularly meaningful and remunerative employment - on a large
scale without resource destruction.
3. Fiscal and other economic measures designed to promote innovation and delivery of
basic needs and sustainable livelihood opportunities.
4. Design of institutions that effectively internalise sustainable development issues in their
objectives and strategies.
5. Knowledge structures and learning system geared to the achievement of universal
primary education.
6. Promotion of value systems compatible development, particularly focusing on the issues
of equity, environment and community self-reliance.

To achieve these goals, we will have to design communication packages that demonstrate clearly
how endogenous capacity for identifying and solving development problems can be built in each
society in a self-financing and sustainable manner. 