| -we can actually Make It happen- Mohammad Yunus I am very honoured to have been invited to gi8ve the commonwealth lecture 2003. This is a great privilege for me. I world like advantage to this occasion to share my experiences, excitements, frustrations, and of course, my thoughts with you (if it makes sense to you, I hope you’ll use your capacity to do something about it. If it doesn’t make any sense, I don’t have to tell you what you should do. You are all expert on it) I have chosen to speak on the most daring of all millennium Development Goals- halving poverty by 2015. I have chosen it for two reasons. First, this is the most courageous goal mankind ever set for itself. For the last two decades I have been talking about creating a world free from poverty. I talk about it simple because I am totally convinces from my experience of working with poor people that they can get themselves out of poverty if we give them the same or similar opportunities a we give to other. The poor themselves can create a poverty free world all we have to do it to free them from the chains that we have put around them. Secondly, A feeling is getting stronger in me vertyday that very few people are really serious about reaching the goal of halving poverty by 2015. Leaders who made this bold announcement went back to their other important commitments feeling happy that they have captured world’s imagination. As the decision has been taken at the highest level, and a well coordinated powerful machinery will get activated to get the job done. Unfortunately, so far it has not happened. Only the donor agency officials supported by thriving consultancy business are carrying the ball. What is emerging reminds us of the decade of nineties when the global goals were put in the form of “Education for all by the year 2000”. “Health for all by the year 2000”, “Everything else for all bt the 2000”. My worry is that these courageous millennium goals my degenerate into a cut and paste job of the earlier edition, merely replacing the “year 2000” by the “year 2015”, with appropriate changes in the text. Please forgive me if sound too pessimistic. I assure you that I remain a compulsive optimist despite all the bad signs that I see. I keep hoping that these signs will change. I am a optimist because I am convinced that poverty is not as difficult a subject as the experts keep warning us about. This is not about space science, or about an intricate design of a complicated machine. This is about people. I don’t see the possibility of a human being becoming a ‘problem’ when it comes to is or her won well-being. All the ingredients for ending poverty of a person always comes neatly package with the person himself. A human being is born n this world fully equipped not only to take care of himself (which all other life-forms can do too), but also to contribute in enlarging the well-being of the world as a whole (that’s where special role of a human being lies). Then why should one billion plus people on the planet surfer through a life-time of misery and indignity and spend every moment of their lives looking for food for physical survival alone? We must find some explanations. This will help us achieve the 20015 goal. Poverty is not Created by the Poor People Here is my explanation. Poverty is not created by the poor people. So wh shouldn’t give them an accusing look. They are the victims. Poverty has been created by the economic and social system that we have designed for the world. It is the institutions that we have built, and feel so proud of, which created poverty. It is the concepts we developed to understand the reality around us, made us see things wrongly. They took us down a wrong path, and caused misery for people. It is our policies borne out of our reasoning and theoretical framework, with which we explain interactions among institutions and people, that caused this problem for so many human beings. It is the failure at the top rather than lack of capability at the bottom which is the root cause of poverty. The essence of my arguments here today is that in order to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, poverty we must go back to the drawing board. Concepts, institutions, and analytical frame conditions which created poverty, cannot end poverty. If we can intelligently re-work the frame conditions, poverty will be gone, never to come back again. In this presentation I will draw your attention to five issues which need to be urgently revisited: (a) widening the concept of employment
(b) ensuring financial services even to the poorest person
(c) recognizing every single human being as a poorest person
(d) Recognizing social entrepreneurs as potential agents for creating a word with peace, harmony, and progress.
(e) Recognizing the role of globalization and information technology in reducing poverty. Labels: Mohammad Yunus |
