Don't blame the poor for our countries' woes

A politician in France, the country of the "droits de l'homme", is questioning the rights afforded to people living in poverty. Europe Minister, Laurent Wauquiez, is proposing to cut benefits to social security claimants, wrongly claiming (and since rebuked by his own party) that it was possible for couples where neither is working can receive more in benefits than a household where there is a person in work. He has also decried the "assistance" culture created through social security benefits as a "cancer on French society".

How easy it is to attack those who are among society's most vulnerable when things get tough. And France is by no means alone in doing this. Take David Cameron's headline grabbing statement last month about disability benfit claimants that led to the Daily Mirror stating,"People who are too fat to work are biting a huge hole in the country's finances." Closer inspection of the Government's own figures of the number of people claiming disability benefits due to obesity puts the figure at a whopping 1800 people, just over 0.001% of total government spending.

It made me think of a new joint publication between ATD Fourth World and the Forum for a New World Governance, entitled "Extreme Poverty and World Governance". One of the most interesting points in it for me is how it is so easily to manipulate opinion and turn it against the poor. "Fear is at the root of the processes operating to make evil and social injustice acceptable. This means that the violence, sometimes in its extreme form, imposed on certain categories of people ends up being seen as normal." (...) "Long-standing prejudices distinguishing the "deserving poor", who have to be helped, from the "undeserving poor", who have to be punished, and encouraging the belief that all societies have a scrapheap, help to legitimize the violence meted out to the groups of people disqualified in this way."

To combat this, the book suggest that this vision of people living in poverty can be turned around when there is "an inner recognition of the suffering, fragility and hopes of the people who endure extreme poverty" (...) "an alliance with those people, a commitment to take action on their behalf."


The fact that 5000 people marched in London today to protest against benefit cuts, added to the hundreds of thousands who marched in March, demonstrates that an alliance does exist which refuses to accept that people living in poverty should be made scapegoats by politicians looking for easy soundbites for front-page headlines.

A day without dignity

"Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world," So begins the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in 1948 by the founding member states of the United Nations. 

April 5th has been suggested as "A day without dignity" as a counter to the TOMS campaign  "A Day Without Shoes."

Dignity is central to our sense of wellbeing. Yet it is a concept denied all too often to people living in poverty. When people living in poverty were asked their views on the Draft Guiding Principles on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, the demand for equal dignity was central to their vision of how to combat poverty. In the resulting report, what comes through is that extreme poverty cannot be resolved through charity, and aid should not destroy the dignity nor the creativity of recipients:


“We don’t want the local authorities to come into our communities, into our village just to bring us second-hand clothes. We don’t want them to give us gifts. What we want are respectable jobs – work that allows us to live like normal human beings.” (Cusco, Peru)


"Aid must not destroy human dignity and creativity. It requires taking the time to talk with the person in order to understand what they want. We have to avoid repeating the mistakes of donors who decide what people should do." (Dakar, Senegal)


In the 21st Century, surely we can do better than taking off our shoes and giving them to charity. Poverty is  a cause, and a consequence, of violations of human rights. Rather than go without our shoes, we would do better to imagine going without the right to housing, decent work, education, water and sanitation, food, citizenship, legal assistance...and, fundamentally, having your opinion in how to eradicate poverty taken into account. 

Guiding a path to a world without poverty

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has just published a consultation to seek views on the Draft Guiding Principles on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights.

Yet another set of guidelines? Allow me to raise my voice to be heard above that of the cynics among you  to reveal how these guiding principles can offer real progress in the fight against extreme poverty.

Firstly, real effort has been made to seek to views of people experiencing poverty. Organisations, including ATD Fourth World, have worked with groups of people living in poverty to ensure the guiding principles correspond to the challenges they face and the solutions they deem effective.

Secondly, they recognise that extreme poverty in itself constitutes a violation of human dignity and that for its effective eradication, priority attention should be given to the poorest and most excluded in society.


And thirdly, these guidelines are not a simple theoretical wishlist. They clearly define the responsibilities of duty bearers (government authorities) and provide a common point of departure for action by all those involved in the fight against poverty, whether from the public, private or NGO sector, based on the realities of the situation of persons living in extreme poverty. 


The consultation will run to June 2011 and a report will be presented to the Human Rights Council in early 2012. The report will be used to finalise the Guiding Principles, which will be presented to the Council for adoption in September 2012. 


The greater the response to this consultation, the more it will persuade the Human Rights Council of the importance of these Guidelines to the fight against poverty, thus facilitating the path toward their eventual adoption. 


One concrete action that people can take is to encourage their Government to respond to the consultation, as well as civil society organisations of which they are members. More information is available on the ATD Fourth World website.

Fetching water versus fetching a cuppa

I got sent the other day a very revealing email concerning Water Aid's "End Water Poverty" campaign (h/t Laura Cowley). It has some interesting facts about how the average Brit spends his or her time. Did you know for example that we spend about six hours a week drinking tea and coffee? That’s the same amount of time it itakes on average to make two trips to collect water in sub-Saharan Africa. 


Something to bear in mind the next time you trapse to the kitchen to put the kettle on... There's more on their campaign, as well as a petition to end water poverty, on their website.

All you can farm for $200 a week

I came across this video below from the Guardian website on Duncan Green's blog. An Indian company has bought an area of land the size of Wales in south-west Ethiopia for which it pays the Ethiopian government just over US$200 a month. Most of the workers receive less than US$1 and the food produced will be exported to India. And this in a country where a large proportion of the population are still dependent on foreign food aid.

Is this just an inevitable consequence of globalisation, where the interests of large corporations supercede those of the indigenous population? Can private sector companies be held to account to ensure they give due regard to international human rights norms? Relevant to this issue, Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights will be considered by the UN's Human Rights Council this June. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, has also issued a call to consider a set of eleven human rights principles regarding "land grabbing".

The land grab phenomenon thows up a lot of questions regarding the fight against poverty and for sustainable development. Anyone got any answers?

Link to game

For some reason the link to the game I refered to in my post yesterday was down. Today it's working - you can check it out here.

Look forward to your comments after you've given it a look.

Can you turn Haiti into a game?

With spring in the air, time for this blog to emerge from hibernation...


And what better way than a moral question. I came across on the Global Poverty Project website a game which has been developed by a group of children from Brooklyn, NY who are involved in a project to develop online games run by Global Kids Online Leadership program. The game I came across is called, "Ayiti: The Cost of Life" and it involves "Helping the Guinard family to make ends meet and get ahead in their poverty-stricken homeland, Haiti. In this sometimes tragic and always challenging simulation game, you help the parents, Jean and Marie, and their children, Patrick, Jacqueline, and Yves, make decisions about work, education, community building, personal purchases, and health care that might brighten their future."


According to Global Kids' website, "During the 2005-2006 school year, Global Kids Youth Leaders in the Playing for Keeps program at South Shore High School gained leadership, research, and game design skills while producing a socially conscious online game, Ayiti: The Cost of Life (CostofLife.org). The youth chose to design a game that focuses on the issue of poverty as an obstacle to education and uses the country of Haiti as a case study. The game and its associated curriculum were released through UNICEF’s Child Alert: Haiti website(...) Since it was released in October 2006, hundreds of thousands of people have played Ayiti. The game and the after school component are being evaluated by the Center for Children and Technology."


I played the game to see what it was about (this morning the link is down for some reason). The game is user friendly and has been well designed by the kids. But no matter how hard I tried, the Guinard family kept dying on me, one by one, as I ran out of money and they got too sick to work or go to school. 


The game certainly made me think about the challenges extreme poverty brings to a family in Haiti: health, education, lack of money and decent work, hurricanes. There are even pop ups occasionally telling you it's Carnival and how happy the community are to celebrate, so you get small glimpses of the culture.


The game also made me think about what Haitian kids would think of this game about trying to keep alive and flourish their fellow citizens. I couldn't find anywhere on the website reaction from Haitians.


It also made me think about the extent to which it is fair for people to learn about a country based principally on its hardship. What you come away with from the game is how harsh and fragile life is in the country. More often than not, the game will end in the death of the family after about 15 minutes play, in which time 2 or 3 years have gone by in the life of the family. 


What's missing is a real insight into how people really live to really do justice to the struggle of the Haitians (or any people come to that). How do Haitian children spend their day, how do they help their family, what games do they play, what are their hopes and dreams? 


I think it's a great idea to learn about a country through a game. But my question is whether it is morally acceptable to learn about a country through a game in which people die?