North by Northwestern

Large swaths of our world’s population must survive — note: not live, but survive — on the equivalent of $2 a day. There’s no debate that poverty exists or that poverty sucks. Yet not all plans to eradicate poverty are equal; some are so ill-conceived that they eventually lead to more poverty and complicate the landscape for those with effective ideas.

A solution to global poverty is possible. That poverty is still so pervasive is not because of ignorance or apathy, not because we don’t care enough or because we don’t work hard enough. Poverty is still a problem because so far, we have taken the wrong approach. And the small, piecemeal campaign advocated by AID and the $2-a-day stunt belongs not only to the camp of well-intentioned-but-ineffective but is also harmful to the cause of world poverty eradication.

“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.” — James Joyce

Need proof that small donations, affecting only a handful of the disadvantaged, don’t work? Put $2 into the cup of a panhandler on Sherman Ave. Return the next day. Is he still there? Small donations, while helping to smooth the consumption of the needy from day to day, don’t solve the problem. The type of poverty most often experienced in the least-developed countries, where a significant portion of the population is poor, is structural. The idea is not complicated: countries too poor to feed their people are also too poor to build the infrastructure — roads, sewers, hospitals and schools — required to move their development forward.

Handing out bottled water is easier than building a school, training teachers, educating engineers, designing sewers, installing filters and laying the pipes to take the clean water to homes. The latter is more effective at reversing poverty; by trumpeting the little steps, AID is advocating handing out bottled water.

Because of these underlying structural differences, poverty affects nations in varying degrees. Thus, even the average homeless, jobless, impoverished American has a standard of living higher than that of the average citizen in the world’s poorest countries. Soup kitchens and $5 donations go a long way in the United States because the baseline quality of life is higher to begin with, but also because the U.S. has the infrastructure — government welfare and private charities — to get the donations to the people who would most benefit from them. But those same meager handouts put the poorest countries on a reverse track: by keeping large populations barely alive, such measures actually make the chore of building infrastructure from scratch much less appealing to Western donors.

“We have the means and the capacity to deal with our problems, if only we can find the political will.” — Kofi Annan

Until the developed nations commit to providing a new kind of aid that equips these countries with the means to build functioning institutions, they will continue to be mired in the same kind of poverty. By advocating small donations and small steps, the $2-a-day campaign misinforms the very people they supposedly want to recruit to the cause. It distorts the situation for anyone who becomes ensnared by the challenge’s promise to eradicate poverty: the myopia of small donations discourages longer term planning by giving us a false sense of doing good now.

There will be good to come out of this campaign. Money will be donated to charities and a family will have dinner on their table thanks to the generosity of Northwestern students. That’s commendable. But at what expense does this small gain come? Any participant who walks away genuinely believing that a $10 donation, if repeated enough times, is enough to eradicate poverty will be one more person not advocating for making a significant investment in poverty, the hard and costly methods that can’t be met by cartons of food and medicine and bottles of clean water.

Poverty is not an incurable disease. We can aim higher than merely managing the condition for its billions of victims. It doesn’t take an awareness campaign to know that living on no money is impossible. Of course, AID’s aim goes deeper: to educate the public about the extent of world poverty and call them to action. Unfortunately, empathy won’t build libraries or stock them with books. No amount of identifying with poverty can end it.

To eradicate poverty will require money, and that in a constant, growing stream. We need actions that will change the landscape of urban slums, ideas that are scalable. Depending on the generosity of a bunch of American college students is not sustainable and will never eradicate poverty. Inspiring change will require the movements of big players.

Go ahead and skip that concert and donate the price to charity instead, but don’t stop there. Tell your Congressperson that you want the U.S. to spend more than a paltry .16 percent of GDP on foreign aid. Advocate for policies that will make it profitable for companies to build factories and bring capital into the poorest of countries. Donate small change if that’s what you can afford, but make sure your actions will reverberate in large ways.