What’s the best way of investing in the developing world? One organization is empowering families by investing in mothers.

Hands to Hearts International (HHI) is a non-profit organization that seeks to provide simple and cost-effective programs with tools for women, caregivers, and organizations to improve the early development of children surviving in orphanages, refugee camps, and severely impoverished or conflict-ridden communities.

Since 2004, HHI has brought nurturing care and empowerment to women across three states in India, reaching over 5,300 women and 32,000 children. In 2009, HHI partnered with Medical Teams International to bring education about early childhood development (ECD) and parenthood workshops to mothers and caregivers of orphans in the post-conflict regions of northern Uganda.

Development dollars invested in mothers

The concept of empowered parenting highlights the female’s capacity from within a society’s realm of gender roles and familial duty.  For the vast majority of girls and women in India and Uganda, motherhood is a goal as well as a lifestyle reality.  Marriage, childbirth, and parenthood mark a natural course of life.

Reaching development goals

Conversely, the marks of motherhood, such as the age of childbirth and number of children, are also factors used by development programs to assess courses for aid and progress.  These once exalted occasions of life are at risk of being reduced to measurable socioeconomic indicators of a community’s developmental progress.  Through maternal and ECD education, HHI believes motherhood can be celebrated while applying value to the role of motherhood within the parameters of development goals.

Numerous organizations- such as HHI, Medical Teams International, and Save the Children- are embracing maternal and ECD education as relevant components to women’s empowerment due to the invaluable tools given to successfully raise and educate the next generation.  According to a 2006 UNFPA study, one-quarter to one-half of the world’s girls will become mothers before reaching the age of 18, thus exemplifying the holistic approach of addressing motherhood.

Don’t overlook empowered motherhood

Perhaps empowered motherhood has been avoided or overlooked because practices such as early marriage and early childbirth are focal points of aid.  It appears that in lieu of empowering new mothers, many development programs target girls and women who have not reached this phase of life, hoping that education and entrepreneurial opportunities are sufficient factors for deferment.

But what of the others who were not able to fully embrace such opportunities? Women’s empowerment has proven to be an effort marked with incremental advances that slowly accumulate into inspirational achievements. If parenting and ECD workshops were a standardized within development agendas, women’s empowerment would progress in full circle by targeting women at every stage of life.

Empowering women: Most effective tool

The role and responsibility of motherhood should not be disregarded in the exploration of female entrepreneurship, innovation, and empowerment.  In fact, commemoration of this powerful capacity of motherhood could further magnify the acknowledgement of women’s potential in the economic, social, and domestic sphere.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan most aptly stated:

There is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women. No other policy is as likely to raise economic productivity, lower infant and maternal mortality, or improve nutrition and promote health, including the prevention of HIV/AIDS. When women are fully involved, the benefits can be seen immediately: families are healthier; they are better fed; their income, savings and reinvestment go up. And what is true of families is true of communities and eventually, whole countries.

To embrace an encompassing empowerment model, we should strive to supplement international projects surrounding education and micro-finance programs with early childhood development workshops for the communities of caregivers and mothers.

Many think that mobile phones are an easy way to bring technology to developing countries. But are women being left out of the equation?

Mobile phones have been a boon to developing countries and to social development. Access to mobiles may indeed allow for better medical information, change the way farmers grow and sell crops, expand the way families interact, influence the way governments treat their citizens, and improve the way students learn in schools. But what is the real story behind these benefits? And who really gains from them?

Mobile technology has the ability to change the way we communicate, but its effects are not evenly distributed. In societies that are divided by social and gender roles, women, especially rural women, are often left out. Gender disparity in society is often echoed in mobile usage; while technology allows some women greater social and economic freedom, in other cases, it simply upholds previously held social constructs. In the areas of social interactions, education, and economics, mobile phones have a distinctly gendered impact on its users. An examination of research and case studies that focus on women and mobile technology reveals that although access to mobile telephones has many benefits for female users, it not a solution to female poverty or gender inequality.

The gender imbalance

So why are mobile phones viewed as a near-perfect device? In the media, everyone from The New York Times to The Economist has written about how cell phones are changing the way of life in developing countries for the better. And it’s true that phones are having great effects in many facets of life, for both men and women. However, this cheerleader attitude doesn’t always address the thornier issue of how new technologies fit into established ways of life.

In her case study “Mobile Cell Phones and Poverty Reduction: Technology Spending Patterns and Poverty Level Change among Households in Uganda” (Diga, 2008) Kathleen Diga writes:

…The findings also reveal continuous gender imbalance of mobile phone usage and spending through unequal partner control of the mobile phone and reduced well-being from unprofitable phone calls. Some households suffer under the exacerbated control of assets by the family’s income earner or household head. While some members are increasing their use of the mobile phone, the more vulnerable members feel that they are not benefiting from the new technology purchased.

For example, some focus group women were limited in usage of the phone or they were put under escalated control by their partners. Certain household members rarely made use of the mobile phone while the household head maintained possession of the tool. Women, for example, have calls completed on their behalf as partners fear the overuse of their airtime. The fear may also develop from a perception of breakdown in head authority within households of this conservative community.

These negative perceptions appear to re-enforced asset control particularly with the mobile phone within the household. Even in fruitful social calls with relatives, their own inefficient use of the tool directed the perception of mobile phones as not productive and in fact, inducing poverty unto their family.

In these situations, access to mobile phones neither changed traditional gender roles nor offered a marked improvement in the women’s quality of life. Social benefit programs using mobile tech hinge on the availability of mobile phones. Access to a mobile phone may be limited due to gender norms; in a household where the male head of the house controls the income and the spending, he can also control the phone.

Who has access to mobiles?

In addition to availability, it is also necessary to be able to use the phone: this can mean both affording the phone (with its usage costs), and having the ability to work the phone.  There are also social barriers, for example, accepting the phone as a legitimate means of communication. In many oral cultures, there is importance put on face-to-face communication. Limited phone access and a lack of visual contact resulting in short, impersonal messages can make users feel isolated even if they are in contact with family or advocates via mobiles.

Spotty or expensive service can be limiting to users. Societal norms often leave women in charge of raising families and caring for the home, work that does not earn an income for women to afford a cell phone or airtime. In countries where the cost of making calls is prohibitively expensive, users are left to rely on either SMS messaging or beeps – calling other users and hanging up, so that the recipient calls back the original ‘beeper’ using their minutes.

These work-arounds have distinct downsides; SMS requires literacy in a language supported on cell phones, is relatively expensive as a means of communicatins comparied to women’s incomes, and beeping requires having contacts that can financially support making phone calls.

Of course, there are documnted positive impacts of mobiles; programs such as Text To Change, BridgeIT and Souktel, while gender-neutral, offer great opportunities to women – from anonymous sexual and reproductive health information, to the reinforcement of positive professional female role models, to fair access to job opportunities. And indeed, mobile phones have been shown to be a successful source of personal and professional growth for women in many instances. In Steven Klonner and Patrick Nolen’s 2008 case study “Does ICT Benefit the Poor? Evidence from South Africa,” the authors show that mobile phones can have a distinctly positive economic effect on female users:

We find substantial effects of network roll-out on labor market outcomes with remarkable gender-specific differences. Employment increases by 15 percentage points when a locality receives complete network coverage.

A gender-differentiated analysis shows that most of this effect is due to increased employment by women, in particular those who are not burdened with large child care responsibilities at their homes. All of the employment gains accrue in wage employed occupations.

Self-employment does not change significantly as network coverage becomes available.

We also find a substantial sectoral shift among the rural employed. Agricultural employment decreases substantially, especially among males.

To highlight our gender findings, mobile phone network roll-out has left employment for males unaffected but did result in a substantial sectoral shift out of agriculture while women experienced large gains in employment, albeit with no changes in the sectoral composition. Household income increases in a pro-poor way when cellular infrastructure is provided and the estimated decreases in extreme poverty are substantial.

The access divide

In theory, the greatest benefit of a mobile phone is that they give the user access to a much broader circle of communication than before. The problem with this theory is that it assumes that mobile phones are a solution in-and-of-themselves – that the presence of a mobile phone immediately offers unlimited access to the outside world.

Yet, many poor women in developing countries are unable to access this technology. In Dayoung Lee’s 2009 study “The Impact of Mobile Phones on the Status of Women in India,” she finds that there is a positive correlation between cell phone ownership and greater female autonomy; namely, that female mobile users have greater intolerance for domestic abuse. However, she makes the point that much of the benefits from cell phones are dependent on having access to the cell phones in the first place, writing:

Household ownership of mobile phones does not indicate that women have access to them, or that women own them. Because mobile phones can be carried around, husbands may have more complete control over them than over landline phones. If they take the mobile phone to work, for example, women have no means of taking advantage of it.

This is a key issue in the debate: are the women who most need access to mobile phones getting it? In the poorest areas, cell phones are scarcer than in richer areas, and cost and literacy impove greater barriers to women who tend to be poorer and more likely to be illiterate than men. While we lack any kind of reliable data on access to phones by sex globally, women who are most at risk for domestic abuse or isolation are often the ones who are most likely to be unable to access mobile phones. Similarly, it is often the poorest, most rural women who could most use information about market prices, civil rights, and female health care.

According to Kiss Brian Abraham, this is can lead to a divided female class; based on those who have access to phones and the income to support them, and those who don’t. Kiss Brian Abraham’s wrote “The Names in Your Address Book: Are Mobile Phone Networks Effective in Advocating for Women’s Rights in Zambia?”, chapter nine of the book ”African Women and ICTs: Investigating Technology, Gender and Empowerment” (edited by Ineke Buskens and Anne Webb). She writes:

Over a period of time, low-income-earning women who are part of the women’s empowerment mobile-phone-sustained virtual network begin to lose their ‘voice’. They become silent listeners and simply recipients of texts and alerts from more financially empowered members. They become the mobile phone virtual network’s ‘lower classes’.

Strides are being made in equalizing woman’s educational opportunities, but poverty and illiteracy can be huge obstacles to women trying to benefit from mobile opportunities. Kiss Brian Abraham expands on this noting the role that finances and education play in determining whether a user can take advantage of mobile opportunities:

Adequate income, then, is a means to capabilities, and the cost of using mobile phones reduces the abilities of poor users since their financial resources diminish with every purchase of call units. It is critical to note that the effectiveness of mobile phone advocacy is reliant on constant communication, which demands constant purchase of call units.

In reality, for the poor virtual network member with capability inadequacy, the purchase of call units risks being a further addition to their poverty. Mobile-phone-sustained virtual networks that are used in advocacy for women’s empowerment cannot serve this purpose with the involvement of economically disempowered women unless measures are taken to deliberately empower these women economically.

For the ‘poor’, this train of thought thus begins to undermine the concept of ‘freedom’ that is synonymous with mobile phone use, making ‘free mobile phone access’ and ‘free mobile phone communication’ unrealistic and misleading concepts due to the high cost of communication.

Circumventing cultural norms

While the social divides caused by mobile phones can be serious, in some places, mobile phones can function as clever work-arounds to strict social conventions, allowing women who are comfortable with technology to improve their businesses. For example, in religious Muslim areas, women may be forbidden to speak directly with men. In chapter four of “African Women and ICTs: Investigating Technology, Gender and Empowerment,” Kazanka Comfort and John Dada point out that cell phones can provide a practical solution for female business owners restricted by religious norms in “Women’s Use of Cell Phones to Meet Their Communication Needs: A Study of Rural Women from Northern Nigeria”

The local interpretation of the religious requirement of purdah places constraints on the ‘acceptable space’ for a woman; for example, it is necessary for some Muslim women who wish to engage in certain business transactions to have the services of a third party. Access to a mobile phone now makes it possible for these women to have direct links with their business partners without compromising their purdah status.

In cases such as this, female business owners are able to expand their businesses independently of male influence. Other effects of cell phones on women include safer and less expensive ways to receive remittances via m-payments; easier access to money without reliance on banks can free users to use money with greater security and how they see fit. In a case study from Africa, access to mobile phones changed the way female farmers worked, giving them better access to market rates and a wider audience to whom to sell.

More examples of potential good for women in the mobile market can be found in the health and advocacy fields. Arul Chib’s case study “The Aceh Besar Midwives with Mobile Phones Program: Design and Evaluation Perspectives using the Information and Communication Technologies for Healthcare Model” found that midwives with mobile phones were more likely to turn to medical care providers for help and information and more likely to stay in contact with their charges. In India, ZMQ Software Systems runs a program that provides women with pre-natal health information via SMS. Take Back the Tech uses ICTs to fight harassment, violence, and bullying against women. UNICEF and other health organizations focused on maternal health are making strides in increasing access and services to women through mobile technology.

Mobile phones have had a marked effect on the world. As the technology continues to evolve and penetrate into more areas of the world, there will be adjustments. Thanks to cell phones, many women in developing countries may receive social, educational, and financial opportunities through their mobiles. However, mobile phones are not a panacea for alleviating poverty, sexism, or other gender disparities. The mere existence of a phone in a rural home or community does not mean that the women there will have access to the opportunities promised.

This blog-post was originally published as part of MobileActive.org’s ongoing series on Mobile Myths and Realities: Deconstructing Mobile

If women we given equal status in all societies in the world, we would have not only a better life for women, but a drastic lowering of AIDS, poverty, and population growth. Without a reduction in population growth, no amount of technology can save mankind for very long from man-caused environmental collapse. We could very well see a civilization-saving reversal of world population by this one mechanism alone.

Poor women who have no decision making power their partners, specially their husbands, are the victim of HIV/AIDS. This is one of the main reasons why most people with HIV/AIDS are women. This is true not only in poor communities, but in all social classes. Women are suffereing from AIDS which is not their fault, whether they aware or not. So poverty is one of the factor, but not the only one. We need to change the perception.

These videos, by different human rights organizations, go beyond statistics to tell us the stories of women and their families as they struggle to understand why it is that so many women are dying during childbirth and what needs to be done to stop this.

First, the White Ribbon Alliance produced a four minute video titled Birth and Death explaining the seriousness of Maternal Mortality and how it can be stopped:

Click here to view the embedded video.

UNICEF also created a two minute video to raise awareness about this issue, with 5 steps that can be taken to diminish maternal mortality: education, respect, empowerment, investing and protection.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In this next video, In Silence: Maternal Mortality in India by Human Rights Watch, photographer Susan Meiselas and reporter Dumeetha Luthra traveled to India to follow the story of a woman who died after giving birth:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In Peru, as told by this piece done for CARE by Phil Borges, the Watchmen for Lives program to decrease maternal mortality has proven to be a success: by empowering and educating women from within the communities in the importance of healthcare during pregnancy and by making a chart for midwives with warning signs on when to send women to a clinic, more are going to clinics to give birth, dramatically reducing the numbers of deaths due to complications during labor.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Amnesty International has this documentary piece, 18 minutes long, about Maternal Mortality in Sierra Leone. One in 8 women die in Childbirth there: the inability to pay for medical attention, a practically non-existent healthcare system, lack of trained medical practitioners and understaffed and understocked clinics are the main reasons. As the women in the video tell: everyone there knows a woman who has died during pregnancy or labor.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And from Australia, students from the Nursing and Midwife program at the University of Sydney have created Birthing Kits that they’ve delivered to developing countries to try and prevent unnecessary deaths. It includes a plastic sheet to put under the mother, surgical gloves, scalpel blades, gauze, soap and string to tie off the umbilical cord. In the video, they tell of their initiative and the successful experience they’ve had in Bangladesh.

Click here to view the embedded video.

When it comes to health campaigns, there are many barriers. Let me give you an example from the real world with a focus on Tuberculosis (TB). TB is one of the great causes of morbidity and mortality in the world today, with the World Health Organization estimating that one third of the world’s population is infected with the TB bacteria.

A day in the life of a man getting tested for TB

One evening, a man working for a farmer in a community is visited by a community health worker in a door-to-door campaign aimed at preventing the spread of TB.

The aim is to raise awareness, and encourage individuals to be tested and treated for TB. The skin test is free and provided by a health clinic in a rural agricultural region.

This well-intentioned health worker who lives in the community is invited into the home of this man, and has an opportunity to educate him and his family on Tuberculosis. The health worker concludes the presentation by encouraging the family to be tested for TB at the free clinic in town. The man, not wanting to put his family at risk, and having been compelled by the presentation of this neighbor, plans to visit the clinic the following week.

On Monday, following a 14 hour day at work, he takes the bus from the farm where he works into town to attend the free clinic. He arrives shortly after 7pm and is dismayed to find a large sign indicating the clinic is closed and hours of operation are 8am to 5pm. After some negotiation with his boss the following morning he plans to visit the clinic first thing the following morning and then head back to work after the testing is complete.

The next morning he takes the bus directly into town and arrives at 8am at the opening of clinic, after 20 minutes navigating the building to find the TB testing area he is only met with more bad news- the free testing takes place from 11am-1pm only.

Having lost a morning’s worth of work he stays until 11am is tenth in line and finally at 12:00noon he is next in line, finally he is called forward and the 5 minute test is completed. He is then told to get the results he will need to come back in two days time between the hours of 11am and 1pm. He heads back to work in time to work the final two hours in the field and then journeys on home.

Use your imagination to hypothesize how this story continues.

Victims of false advertising

It is not until we venture into a ‘Day in the Life Of’ or DILO (a term shared with me by Dr. Everold Hosein) that we truly understand the barriers both individual and systemic that plague even the most well-intentioned campaigns to promote health and other social programs.

Now, the clinic did have some important aspects to their campaign that were culturally sensitive and responsive to the needs of the particular community:

• they utilized key opinion leaders from the neighborhood to implement the door-to-door campaign and
• they eliminated the financial cost of TB testing to encourage participation.

However, there were some crucial elements of the program that were not dissected and thus resulted in loss of income, and physical and emotional stress:

• the health center did not boast clear signage, and therefore potential patients were left roaming around a large building trying to locate the specific TB clinic area.
• the health center was open ‘business hours’, which was totally incompatible with the population they were trying to reach- mostly farmers working 14 hour day.
• the free testing was only available during the middle of the day and almost certainly required the patient to take an entire day off work to get to the clinic, receive testing, and return home.

The way forward?

The story and context detailed above could be equally applied in most communities in the world, switching farm worker for fisherman, and switching TB for HIV/AIDS and so on. We oft move too quickly in our planning to focus on the outcomes we wish to achieve, and spend frighteningly too little time understanding our intended audience of our campaign to create an intervention that is both meaningful to the consumer and appeals to their needs and desires, while also reducing barriers to encourage participation.

While, I cannot offer a comprehensive solution or technique that will insulate the most well meaning campaigns from the challenges that have been touched on above, I endeavor that in our respective fields and roles as advocates and professionals within public health, and international development that we remain mindful of the DILO. This perhaps will reduce health disparities and promote equitable access to health and social programs and services.

For the 51 million of girls around the world who were married off as children, marriage is risky sexual behavior. A girl who is married off at 12 or 13-years-old is regarded as a commodity by her family – property to be traded to feed the other children or to repay debts. Or she is property taken in exchange for a dowry.

She has no ability to negotiate condom use with her husband. And as he is likely to be 10 or more years older than his child bride, the chances that he is already infected can be huge.

It is in these societies where the stigma of AIDS tends to remain so great that women breastfeed their children even if they know they are HIV positive rather than risk being ostracized and abandoned.

When this woman who lost her childhood to marriage eventually dies of complications of AIDS, she is likely to leave daughters. In desperation some of them turn to sex work to survive.

We will never get a handle on the spread of HIV unless we put an end to early marriage and keep girls in school. Educated girls marry later and tend to have more economic stability. These are big challenges and they will take time but the alternative is to wait for a vaccine and that will only combat AIDS. The underlying problems will remain.

Given their limited choices, poor people are ingenious and resourceful – they have to be, in order to survive. But poverty’s companions encourage the infection. Very poor people may lack confidence or hope in the future. The pressures under which they live encourage high-risk behaviour, from casual relationships to drug and alcohol abuse and gender violence. Living with HIV and AIDS, they find that lost earnings, lost crops and missing or inadequate care make them weaker and make their poverty deeper. AIDS can push vulnerable families and whole communities into poverty. Children of affected families grow up in a world of diminished opportunities. The cycle intensifies.

Inequality sharpens the impact of poverty, and a mixture of poverty and inequality may be driving the epidemic. A truck driver is not well paid compared to the executives who run his company; but he is rich compared to the people in the villages he drives through. For the woman at a truck stop, a man with a few rand or rupees is wealthy. She knows the risks, but she is desperate for money to feed her family. That may be enough to buy him unprotected sex; and perhaps to doom her and her family as well.

If poor people were given the conditions that are necessary for better health, such as clean water, good food, sanitation, shelter and adequate medical care, if they were armed with literacy and access to information, if they were given voice and space to participate in decisions that affect their lives, they would be better equipped to resist the spread of HIV and AIDS. None of these measures call for huge investments or high technology. But they do require the determination to put poor people first.

It’s exciting to see how UK Prime Minister links ‘poverty’ to ’the Internet’. As a communications consultant, blogger and someone working with online communication, I often find myself in a position where I have to explain myself, let alone to my parents, when discussing the role of the Internet in advocacy work: “ So basically, you are on Facebook every day, right?“ is a common reaction.

The honest answer to this question, which I think many other young people can relate to, would be “Yes, I am on Facebook every day”. But I like to think that being a ‘net-citizen’ and engaging in conversations with people from all over the world on a daily basis, is more than just a waste of time. I like to think that there is more to it.

I almost felt tempted to echo the words “yes we can”, when I recently stumbled upon an excellent video by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, “Wiring a web for global good”. Here is what he has to say about the Internet and poverty:

“We’re at a unique moment in history. We can use today’s interconnectedness to develop our shared global ethic — and work together to confront the challenges of poverty, security, climate change and the economy”.

The video is provided by TED, a US-based nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas on technology, development and design. It features Mr. Brown , who is standing in front of a photo-projector and a big audience, curious to hear what he has top say about poverty and the challenges facing the world today. I think everyone felt surprised when Mr. Brown introduced his argument – that interconnectedness is vital when it comes to poverty reduction.

To illustrate his point of view, Mr. Brown features heart-gripping pictures that have been transferred from country to country over time and gradually have become part of our collective memory:

“This is Birhan, who was the Ethiopian girl who launched Live Aid in the 1980s, 15 minutes away from death when she was rescued, and that picture of her being rescued is one that went round the world”.

Mr. Brown continues:

“This next is the Sudanese girl, a few moments from death, a vulture hovering in the background. And what do all these pictures and events have in common?  What they have in common is what we see unlocked and what we cannot see. What we see unlocked: the invisible ties and bonds of sympathy that bring us together to become a human community. What these pictures demonstrate is that we do feel the pain of others, however distantly”.

Well said.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not even implying that the Internet can replace a relief package, neither am I suggesting that the Internet can compensate for the social and personal losses that follow poverty. I am rather suggesting, similar to Mr. Gordon Brown, that the Internet can provide a platform where we can be ourselves and have a global conversation on important topics, such as poverty and AIDS. As Mr. Brown puts it:

“What I think these pictures demonstrate is that we do believe in something bigger than ourselves. What these pictures demonstrate is that there is a moral sense across all religions, across all faiths, across all continents — a moral sense that not only do we share the pain of others, and believe in something bigger than ourselves but we have a duty to act when we see things that are wrong that need righted, see injuries that need to be corrected, see problems that need to be rectified”.

The Internet can not eradicate poverty nor compensate for the loss of dignity and respect that follows poverty. But it is full of potential when it comes to building a bridge between people who want to make an effort and families affected by poverty.

I will wrap up this blog post by sharing some of the questions that remained after having watched the video:  Will providing Internet access to more people help end the poverty that disables millions in so many nations? And if the Internet is the answer, how do we approach challenges such as the digital divide and the fact that Internet is not accessible in all regions of the world? It is my impression that the impact of the Internet and its role in poverty reduction is poorly understood.  Correct me if I am wrong.

However, we do see good examples of governments, donors, activists, development organizations and bloggers that are realizing the benefits that Internet access promises in the fight against poverty.  The future will tell if we are witnessing a few isolated examples or these are signs of a revolution.

Anyway, over to you Mr. Brown. I will let you do the talking and simply just guide readers attention to your video.

Why the financial crisis is causing problems for poor

I just stumbled upon a very interesting debate on The Economix Blog, a blog by The New York Times.

In a time where global experts and scholars seem to disagree about the victims and the spoilers of the financial crisis, I find this piece very thought-provoking.

Behind the piece is Mr. Pedro Conceição who is director of the Office of Development Studies (O.D.S) at the United Nations Development Program, a leading United Nations agency in the fight against poverty.

Mr. Conceição’s explains why the financial crisis is causing problems for poor countries in the first place and asks:

“How did this happen? How is it possible that what started as a high-finance crisis in the world’s richest economies has come to hurt people in some of the poorest parts of the world?”

Luckily, Mr. Conceição’s has also agreed to answer reader questions about how the global recession is affecting the world’s poorest countries, and what can or should be done to help them. So far, many readers of the New York Times have joined the heated debate.

Too many people

According to reader “Judith Weller”, Mr. Conceição needs to pay more attention to population issues:

“Why isn’t there more emphasis on population reduction. Africa has increased its population but not its ability to feed and care for them. Instead of hand-outs wouldn’t it be better to insist on population control and limiting the number of children so that population can be brough into balance with natural resource and local food available?” argues Ms. Weller.

The blame game

Another reader named “Dan” argues that:

“Countries get into these situations like Zimbawee by their own undoing. They have internal political strife that rips their country appart at the seems and so, why should other nations be responsible for them financially?”

Don’t forget global warming

But what about global warming, asks another reader named “Caroline”:

“Strange that the man says nothing at all about global warming. It is a major factor in world poverty: drout, impossible to grow food, seasons not existing anymore, crops destroyed by storms, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes. No water at all in India, not even to drink”.

What do you think? Join the debate on The Economix Blog or write a comment below.

FLICKR-PHOTO WITH  CREATIVE COMMONS LISCENSE BY WM JAS. NAME: “WHY DOES POOR PEOPLE BE POOR”