Poverty: A Denial of Human Rights.

• Author: Speth, James Gustave

Development cooperation is in crisis in the true medical sense: its condition will either improve towards recovery or slide into terminal disease. During 1996, official development assistance (ODA) from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) donor countries dropped in 11 of these 21 nations. In the aggregate, total ODA dropped to 0.25 percent of the total gross national product (GNP) of OECD nations, an all-time low and well below the 0.7 percent United Nations target. These telling numbers continue the pattern of recent years, and stand in sharp contradiction to the goals expressed by OECD members, the world's most industrialized nations.

Increasing amounts of declining ODA funds are now being channeled to emergency relief. The short-term necessities brought about by increasingly numerous civil conflicts and the growing toll of environmental disasters threaten continued attention to long-term development needs. In a world where absolute numbers of people living in poverty are growing, where vast wealth coexists with the most desperate forms of destitution, development cooperation is more necessary now than ever before. But forms of development cooperation must evolve with today's rapidly changing societies. An end to poverty remains the ultimate goal, and the development community continues to look for entry points to poverty eradication that will most likely bring success. One such new entry point to poverty eradication is the human rights approach to poverty This essay will assert that this approach must be explored in our search for the continued relevance of development cooperation.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has made poverty eradication its overarching priority for many years. In fact, last year's UNDP Human Development Report(1) focused on poverty, introducing the concept of human poverty The World Bank has also increased its efforts to end poverty and will focus on poverty in its World Development Report for the year 2000. Along these lines, the importance of poverty eradication as a dominant theme of development cooperation is shared by a broad range of multilateral development institutions and bilateral donors. In March 1998, the Administrative Committee on Coordination, comprised of the executive heads of all UN agencies, including the Bretton Woods institutions, met to discuss a common approach to poverty eradication.

There have been gains in the global effort to end poverty The proportion of people living below national poverty lines has fallen. For example, in China, and in 14 other countries with populations that add up to 1.6 billion, the share of the population living below the national poverty line has been halved in less than 20 years. In the same time period, ten more countries, accounting for almost another billion people, have reduced the proportion of their population living below the poverty line by one-quarter or more.(2) Since 1960, in little more than a generation, the rate of child deaths in developing countries has been more than halved, malnutrition rates have declined by more than one-third and the proportion of rural families without access to safe water has fallen from nine-tenths to about one-quarter.(3)

But there is still much to be done. Efforts to reduce poverty have been undermined in recent years by epidemics, such as HIV/ AIDS, armed conflict, stagnant economies and environmental degradation which threatens the sustainability of resources on which the poor depend for their livelihoods. Between 1987 and 1993, the number of people with incomes of less than U.S.$1 a day increased by 100 million, and the numbers appear to be still growing in every region of the world, except in parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific.(4)

In this essay, I will focus on two aspects of our work that make the UNDP's approach to the eradication of poverty distinctive: a broader definition of poverty, and consequently a broader approach--a human rights approach--to its eradication. The first section of the paper will examine current trends in world poverty It introduces new measures to argue that the concept of poverty goes beyond income deprivation. Non-income aspects, such as life expectancy, literacy and deprivation of health services are introduced as components of human poverty The second section makes the case for viewing poverty as a denial of human rights. It outlines the UNDP's understanding of how a human rights approach sheds new light on the challenges of eliminating poverty The third section provides a survey of international agreements and declarations which form the basis for a human rights approach to poverty The fourth section outlines the UNDP's understanding of how a human rights approach can help in programs designed to eliminate poverty. The fifth section looks at current UNDP efforts to implement a human rights approach to poverty eradication. Though the approach is still in its initial phase, this section sets out some relevant experiences and current programs that might serve as a guide to future action.

EXPANDING THE CONCEPT OF POVERTY

Traditional measures of poverty are themselves inadequate. The development community has long known that identifying an income or consumption cutoff below which people are poor, provides an incomplete picture of poverty Although income focuses on an important dimension of poverty, it only partially describes the many levels of human destitution. A focus on income measures of poverty neglects the specifics of each community Each community has "necessary needs," and these necessities vary across cultures and historical circumstances. The alternative, to use different poverty lines for different communities, is problematic in terms of making international comparisons. How can we define a poverty line for every country7 Should we just use national poverty lines, with all their political connotations, or should we construct global indicators? The uniformity of income-measures masks many assumptions and imprecisions that do not stand up to rigorous analysis. People lack income for a variety of reasons, including unemployment, limited access to resources such as land or credit, illiteracy, poor health and marginalization from society

Deprivation poverty, as presented in the 1997 Human Development Report, is not the same thing as income poverty.(5) The correlation between income poverty (using the U.S.$1 a day standard) and human deprivation is not especially strong. Therefore, it is important to see poverty in the aspects of both income and other deprivations. Income is only a partial translation of these deprivations; it is not the cause of these deprivations. By focusing on income, the development community is seeing the reflection of poverty, not its reality. Furthermore the sources and causes of poverty are not addressed, only its symptoms.

As a practical matter, this becomes very important around the world, as countries increasingly move to develop anti-poverty strategies. At the World Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995, 117 heads of state and heads of government, agreed to develop anti-poverty strategies to eliminate the worst aspects of poverty in their countries on a time-bound basis.(6) Part of this strategy is poverty mapping: knowing poor people's location, their numbers and their characteristics (i.e., urban or rural backgrounds, ethnic identity and minority status). Such characteristics cannot be covered by a single indicator, whatever the merits of an income poverty line or however it is calculated. Instead, one needs complex indicators that reflect the complexity of lives in poverty.

To supplement traditional income-measures of poverty, the Human Development Report proposes a new composite measure: the Human Poverty Index (HPI). The HPI brings together, in a composite index, different features of deprivation in order to determine an aggregate judgment on the extent of poverty in a community. The HPI was calculated for 78 countries for which data of comparable quality was available. Three measures of deprivation are combined to reach the HPI:

1. deprivation of life, which is measured by the percentage of people expected to die before the age of 40;

2. ...