Poverty: A Denial of Human Rights

Development cooperation is in crisis in the true medical sense: its condition will either improve towards recovery or slide into terminal disease. During 1996, official development assistance (ODA) from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) donor countries dropped in 11 of these 21 nations. In the aggregate, total ODA dropped to 0.25 percent of the total gross national product (GNP) of OECD nations, an all-time low and well below the 0.7 percent United Nations target. These telling numbers continue the pattern of recent years, and stand in sharp contradiction to the goals expressed by OECD members, the world's most industrialized nations. Increasing amounts of declining ODA funds are now being channeled to emergency relief. The short-term necessities brought about by increasingly numerous civil conflicts and the growing toll of environmental disasters threaten continued attention to long-term development needs. In a world where absolute numbers of people living in poverty are growing, where vast wealth coexists with the most desperate forms of destitution, development cooperation is more necessary now than ever before. But forms of development cooperation must evolve with today's rapidly changing societies. An end to poverty remains the ultimate goal, and the development community continues to look for entry points to poverty eradication that will most likely bring success. One such new entry point to poverty eradication is the human rights approach to poverty This essay will assert that this approach must be explored in our search for the continued relevance of development cooperation. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has made poverty eradication its overarching priority for many years. In fact, last year's UNDP Human Development Report(1) focused on poverty, introducing the concept of human poverty The World Bank has also increased its efforts to end poverty and will focus on poverty in its World Development Report for the year 2000. Along these lines, the importance of poverty eradication as a dominant theme of development cooperation is shared by a broad range of multilateral development institutions and bilateral donors. In March 1998, the Administrative Committee on Coordination, comprised of the executive heads of all UN agencies, including the Bretton Woods institutions, met to discuss a common approach to poverty eradication. There have been gains in the global effort to end poverty The proportion of people living below national poverty lines has fallen. For example, in China, and in 14 other countries with populations that add up to 1.6 billion, the share of the population living below the national poverty line has been halved in less than 20 years. In the same time period, ten more countries, accounting for almost another billion people, have reduced the proportion of their population living below the poverty line by one-quarter or more.(2) Since 1960, in little more than a generation, the rate of child deaths in developing countries has been more than halved, malnutrition rates have declined by more than one-third and the proportion of rural families without access to safe water has fallen from nine-tenths to about one-quarter.(3) But there is still much to be done. Efforts to reduce poverty have been undermined in recent years by epidemics, such as HIV/ AIDS, armed conflict, stagnant economies and environmental degradation which threatens the sustainability of resources on which the poor depend for their livelihoods. Between 1987 and 1993, the number of people with incomes of less than U.S.$1 a day increased by 100 million, and the numbers appear to be still growing in every region of the world, except in parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific.(4) In this essay, I will focus on two aspects of our work that make the UNDP's approach to the eradication of poverty distinctive: a broader definition of poverty, and consequently a broader approach--a human rights approach--to its eradication. …