Opinion: Reasons Poor Countries Still Remain Poor
By Burnett Munthali
Experience shows that poor management of natural resources, substandard governance, and under-investment in education and human resources are associated with slow growth rates and low real per capita income.
While the root causes of poverty in Sub-saharan Africa are not different from the causes of poverty anywhere else, poverty has been growing in Sub-saharan Africa due to the long-term impacts of external factors like war, genocide, famine, and land availability.
Issues like hunger, illness, and poor sanitation are all causes and effects of poverty. That is to say, that not having food means being poor, but being poor also means being unable to afford food or clean water. The effects of poverty are often interrelated so that one problem rarely occurs alone.
Poorest countries are failing. Collier argues the plight of the ‘bottom billion’ is that they are caught in one (or often several) of four traps; (i) conflict; (ii) mismanaged dependency on natural resources; (iii) weak governance in a small country; and (iv) economic isolation among other very poor economies, with access to big markets available .
The main causes of underdevelopment of an economy include: poverty; child marriage; illiteracy; high population growth rate; corruption; high dependence on agriculture; economic inequality; lack of structural, institutional, and technical change.
Over the past decade, press freedom has seen the largest decline of any other fundamental freedom in Africa, according to Freedom in the World 2015. Proliferation of restrictive laws. Weak regional human rights mechanisms. Economic competitiveness.
Solutions For Poverty
Eliminating Poverty Through Equity. One of the main causes of poverty is inequality. Poor Countries must commit to climate change solutions and climate justice. Eradicating poverty through education. Halting poverty by ending hunger (and thirst). Poverty alleviation through peace. Cash solves poverty. The four contributory factors to poverty include :
- Illiteracy is one of the biggest reasons behind the poverty among the population.
2) Increasing population is causing decreasing employment rate which is boosting the poverty in our society.
3) Lack of funding for the needy people in our society.
4) Lack of social infrastructure of different aspects.n hand.
