An agenda for poverty eradication: Target 2002.

AuthorGayoom, Maumoon Abdul

The Seventh Summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), held at Dhaka in 1993, adopted a "Consensus on Eradication of Poverty in South Asia". By doing so, the Heads of State or Government of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka "committed their Governments unequivocally to the eradication of poverty in South Asia, preferably by the year 2002". What this decision reflects is not so much an over-ambitious target as the urgency of addressing the problem. South Asia, indeed, faces an enormous challenge in eradicating poverty. Nearly 400 million, or about 40 per cent of the 1 billion people who inhabit the region, are living in conditions beneath human dignity, suffering from hunger, malnutrition and disease, and often homeless and helpless. In this scenario, regional cooperation in South Asia has focused, from the beginning, on socio-economic issues. The Sixth SAARC Summit, held in Colombo in 1991, decided to constitute an Independent South Asian Commission on Poverty Alleviation (ISACPA), comprising eminent persons from the region. The ISACPA's mandate was to make an in-depth study of the problem and to make policy-relevant recommendations.

The ISACPA found that, while the success of poverty reduction initiatives of the past had varied, the final result showed that these programmes invariably suffered from the lack of participation of the poor in the formulation and execution of activities. Therefore, in advocating an Agenda of Action, it highlighted the importance of active involvement of the poor. The Seventh SAARC Summit endorsed this approach.

The Agenda of Action to eradicate poverty is based on a strategy of social mobilization - a policy of decentralized agricultural development and small-scale, labour-intensive industrialization and human development. Each member State agreed to draw up a relevant national plan and implement "appropriate pro-poor development strategies at macro- and micro-levels". Further, an enabling international environment was deemed fundamental.

SAARC is not a funding organization. Therefore, the responsibility for carrying out poverty eradication programmes lies with the national authorities of member States.

In the case of the Maldives, the introduction of planned development in the early 1980s, with its focus on sustainable socio-economic progress within a liberal economic framework, has been very successful. Abject poverty is nonexistent, as...

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