Thailand
Thailand: How to strengthen anti-poverty efforts
From 1990 to 2019, the number of people living in extreme poverty (according to the World Bank threshold of US$1.90 per day) plummeted, from 1.9 billion to 648 million.
But Covid-19 has reversed much of this progress. By the end of 2021, the pandemic will have pushed approximately 150 million people back into extreme poverty.
Even before Covid, however, the world was not on track to end extreme poverty in the next decade. Progress had been slowing long before the pandemic hit, with global poverty rates falling by less than half a percentage point per year between 2015 and 2019.
At that pace, even without Covid, 537 million people would have still been living in extreme poverty in 2030, implying failure to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular SDG 1.
At BRAC, the world’s largest Global South-led NGO, decades of designing, implementing, advising on and adapting poverty reduction interventions have given us insights into how to make anti-poverty programmes and policies more effective.
First, programmes need to reach people in the most extreme states of poverty, who face hurdles to accessing social programmes and services. They are less likely to have bank accounts, permanent addresses or formal identification — all of which may be required for registration. They also face social stigma associated with receiving public services, and often lack sufficient information about the programmes for which they are eligible.
In low-income countries, 79% of the bottom quintile of earners receive no social assistance whatsoever. To ensure that help reaches those most in need, governments and their partners must design policies and programmes that overcome the barriers people living in extreme poverty face and integrate them into existing social safety nets.
Second, programmes must empower people living in extreme poverty to build long-term resilience. This goes beyond providing basic needs. People in extreme poverty need help acquiring the skills and resources they need to avoid falling back into the poverty trap.
This approach is crucial in times of crisis, as we found when advising the Philippine government on a recent anti-poverty intervention.
During the pandemic, the programme connected participants to cash assistance from the national government and food assistance from their local government. Meanwhile, it provided the resources and training they needed to establish multiple sources of income. As a result, 76% of participants were able to continue earning income even during strict lockdowns.
Third, programmes need to treat poverty as multifaceted and context-specific. Extreme poverty is multidimensional. An accurate definition must account for the many areas of deprivation people in extreme poverty face, from lack of clean water and electricity to malnutrition and social exclusion.
Based on an assessment of factors related to specific locations and contexts, governments and their partners need to create more holistic interventions that empower poor people to face their unique challenges.
Fourth, programmes must engage local communities and governments, which can create interventions that better reflect the realities of people’s daily lives and gain local buy-in. Local governments can help national governments and their partners identify marginalised households and support their social inclusion.
Fifth, governments and their partners must commit to monitoring, evaluating and learning from programmes as they are implemented, then revise them as needed. Only through evidence-based adaptation can we ensure that programmes have a long-lasting impact and adjust to meet the unique and evolving needs of people.
This must be a collaborative effort. If the international community adopts these steps, anti-poverty programmes can become more inclusive, adaptive and comprehensive. Beyond engaging civil society and academia, governments need development actors, including multilateral institutions and donor countries, to help close resource gaps until they can independently mobilise sufficient domestic resources.
SDG 1 is deeply connected to the other SDGs, from ensuring gender equality to advancing sustainability to improving nutrition. Covid-19 has reversed decades of progress in these areas. The only way to prevent leaving many people behind is to ensure that anti-poverty interventions are better funded, more holistic and more effective at scale.
Source: https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/2162335/how-to-strengthen-anti-poverty-efforts