According to UN reports, the countries were on the right track until the financial crisis hit. This year alone, the number of people living in extreme poverty is expected to grow between 55 million and 90 million.

Before the economic crisis, though, the number of people in developing regions living in extreme poverty fell from 1.8 billion to 1.4 billion in 2005. The UN Millennium Development Goals has targeted to halve, by 2015, the number of people living on less then US$1 per day. Even so, as many as one billion people are likely to remain in extreme poverty by this date.

Giving the frightening figures and implications, the issue of poverty alleviation was not just a matter of theoretical debate, but of urgent answers during the FOT session.

Edward Senzo Mchunu, Minister of Education, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, urged leaders and all those involved to start by changing the target — not to alleviate, but to eliminate poverty.

“How can you assist people living on $1 or less a day? Is it through aid? Is it through education? Is it through investment?” asked Mchunu.

Ashok Advani, founder and publisher of Business India Publications, came up with some concrete solutions, tried successfully by his country.

“India and China are very much in the news (for poverty alleviation),” he said. “I don’t know much about China and I don’t know much about many other countries, but in India we started the process about 15 years after China.”

According to him, there are three factors that helped the subcontinent to come out of extreme poverty — opening up the markets, establishing proper regulations and creating a vibrant voluntary sector that helped the lower classes, not reached by the markets.

“For example, 15 years ago, electricity companies were only allowed to sell to the state, which was bankrupt, but new regulations allowed them to sell to the private sector, which created growth,” said Advani.

Dr Refaat El Sayed, CEO of Hebi Group Egypt, argued that nobody is born poor, but is made poor by the social system. Therefore, the problem should be solved by mending the system, rather than seeking wealth from the exterior.

“I don’t believe in aid. It creates corruption and all kinds of problems,” he declared. Instead, Sayed suggested that governments should work with their own systems and resources, to bring their people out of poverty.

Nothing is further from the truth, though, in the opinion of Dr Rodrigo Jordan, chairman of the Chilean National Foundation for Overcoming Poverty.

“It all depends how you measure poverty,” he explains. This can be done like pictures or like films, which means either singled-out, independent measurements of poverty or more comprehensive, continuous measurements.

“In the US, poverty was measured like a film, which actually showed people going in and out of poverty at least one time,” revealed Jordan.

In Chile, like many other country, a linear system showed a decrease in poverty from 38 per cent a few decades ago to 13.7 per cent today. This is inaccurate, as Jordan pointed out that the more complex “film” system shows that 38 per cent of Chile’s population has been poor at least one time.

He urged, in fact, not only to change the way we measure poverty, but the way we comprehend it too.

“The biggest asset of a country is not its wealth or natural resources, it is its people. If this is considered true, then the poor are an absurd loss of asset,” claimed Jordan.

Governments should, therefore, start looking at their poor not as a burden, as people in need, but as an asset and a potentially good investment.

silvia@khaleejtimes.com