Poverty Eradication Week?
By Juan Fernando Gómez, Stoplight Team at Fundación Paraguaya
Last Monday we woke up to the announcement of a new Nobel Prize in Economics and today we commemorate the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. It turns out that the winners of the Royal Science Academy of Sweden are Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kreme, who conducted a research on the impact of different strategies to reduce poverty. Therefore, more than observing just a day for poverty elimination, we commemorate the whole week.
It is not that poverty does not exist on other weeks of the year, nor that there are no efforts to fight it everyday. What happens is that the Nobel prize winning and the End Poverty day are good excuses to put multidimensional poverty at the center of all agendas, with the media posting notes about it, the internet users making it the trending topic, co-workers discussing about it early in the morning, and families debating about it at dinner time.
Monday’s announcement is the recognition of a method that has changed the way we think about economic development. As medical doctors do, Banerjee, Duflo and Kreme, made poverty the object of a lab study, so they could examine it closely. They have studied the issue with an experimental approach, observing different programs to combat it, comparing their effects with populations that were not exposed to the same treatment, and consequently, assessing their impact. They have made the randomized controlled test an essential component of the study of human development.
Since 1993, every October 17 the United Nations encourages us all to reflect on poverty and our responsibility as a society to end it. This is the day the world remembers that poverty is a violation of human rights and celebrates the efforts of different actors in society to eliminate it. In Paraguay, “Who Owns Poverty?” by Martin Burt, CEO of Fundación Paraguaya, will be launched on the same day. In this book, Martin invites us to a journey through different stories, unlikely thought partnerships, and innovative approaches, which have allowed families to become the protagonists in building a world without poverty.
This poverty week, I would like us all to take the time to reflect and look for ways in which we can keep contributing to poverty elimination. Let’s just keep in mind; in honor of Banerjee, Duflo and Kreme, that we must learn from strategies that have already proven to be efficient in eliminating multidimensional poverty and build on those towards a better life for people.
