When Everything Else Fails, Say No To Poverty

Investments to end poverty 2018

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The reality of being poor brings out a survival mentality, and turns attention away from opportunities taken for granted by everyone else. If you work with people from poverty, some understanding of how different their world is from yours will be invaluable. Since A Framework for Understanding Poverty has guided educators and other professionals through the pitfalls and barriers faced by all classes, especially the poor.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in —became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more. This phenomenal New York Times bestseller tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith.

A stark look at modern day America. Shipler makes clear in this humane study, how the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideology—hard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: He also exposes the interlocking problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poor—white and black, Asian and Latino, citizens and immigrants.

We encounter them every day, for they do jobs essential to the American economy. Wilson is a leading authority on race and poverty, and in this book, he challenges decades of liberal and conservative think-tankers to look squarely at the devastating effects that joblessness has had on our urban ghettos.

Millie Acevedo had her first child before the age of 16 and dropped out of high school to care for her newborn. Would she and her children be better off if she had waited to have them and had married their father first? Why do so many poor American youth like Millie continue to have children before they can afford to take care of them? Over a span of five years, sociologists Edin and Kefalas talked in-depth with low-income single moms like Millie to learn how they think about marriage and family.

Promises I Can Keep offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides the most extensive on-the-ground study to date of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead. They represent an enormous opportunity for companies who learn how to serve them. Not only can it be done, it is being done—very profitably.

This book explains how economic inequality continues to grow in the United States. For the past three decades, America has steadily become a nation of haves and have-nots. Our incomes are increasingly drastically unequal: We have less equality of income than Venezuela, Kenya, or Yemen. But it may be the most important change in this country during our lifetimes-a sharp, fundamental shift in the character of American society, and not at all for the better.

In The Great Divergence, Noah delivers this needed inquiry, ignoring political rhetoric and drawing on the best work of contemporary researchers to peer beyond conventional wisdom. Noah explains not only how the Great Divergence has come about, but why it also threatens American democracy-and most important, how we can begin to reverse it.

Collier writes that 50 failed states—home to the poorest one billion people on Earth—pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century. A struggle rages within each of these nations between reformers and corrupt leaders—and the corrupt are winning. Standard solutions do not work, Collier writes; aid is often ineffective, and globalization can actually make matters worse, driving development to more stable nations.

What the bottom billion need, Collier argues, is a bold new plan supported by industrialized nations. Using the framework of randomized control trials, which allow for large-scale data collection to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention, these two economists assess the impact of a wide range of development programs in alleviating poverty.

They have found that most programs have not been designed with a rigorous understanding of the behaviors and needs of the poor or how aid effects them, they advocate that for programs to be successful they must be designed with evidence gathered from direct interaction with those who they are meant to benefit. Michelle Kennedy had a typical middle class American childhood in Vermont. She attended college, interned in the U. Senate, married her high school sweetheart and settled in the D. But the comfortable life she was building quickly fell apart. At age 24 Michelle was suddenly single, homeless, and living out of a car with her three small children.

She saved her tips in the glove compartment, and set aside a few quarters every week for truck stop showers for her and the kids. With heart-piercing humor and honesty, she describes the frustration of never having enough money for a security deposit on an apartment -— yet having too much to qualify for public assistance. Thousands of people live in the subway, railroad, and sewage tunnels that form the bowels of New York City. If you come from the city as the writer of this blog does … this is no secret. But how they manage to live is. Though they maintain an existence hidden from the world above-ground, tunnel dwellers form a large and growing sector of the homeless population.

They are a diverse group, and they choose to live underground for many reasons some rejecting society and its values, others reaffirming those values in what they view as purer terms, and still others seeking shelter from the harsh conditions on the streets. Their enemies include government agencies and homeless organizations as well as wandering crack addicts and marauding gangs.

Years after Ronald Reagan declared that hunger was no longer an American problem, guess what? Schwartz-Nobel shows that hunger has reached epic proportions, running rampant through urban, rural, and suburban communities, affecting blacks, whites, Asians, Christians and Jews, and nonbelievers alike. Among the people we come to know in this amazing book are the new homeless. This book clearly links persistent poverty among blacks in the United States to the unparalleled degree of deliberate segregation they experience in American cities.

American Apartheid shows how the black ghetto was created by whites during the first half of the twentieth century in order to isolate growing urban black populations. It goes on to show that, despite the Fair Housing Act of , segregation is perpetuated today through an interlocking set of individual actions, institutional practices, and governmental policies.

These independent but intertwined stories follow a migrant family through their circuit, from picking cotton and strawberries to topping carrots — and back again — over a number of years. As it moves from one labor camp to the next, the little family of four grows into ten. Impermanence and poverty define their lives. But with faith, hope, and back-breaking work, the family endures. Examines the realities of welfare dependency and the true cost of subsistence living.

Welfare mothers are popularly viewed as passively dependent on their checks and averse to work. Reformers across the political spectrum advocate moving these women off the welfare rolls and into the labor force as the solution to their problems. Making Ends Meet offers evidence toward a different conclusion: In the present labor market, unskilled single mothers who hold jobs are frequently worse off than those on welfare, and neither welfare nor low-wage employment alone will support a family at subsistence levels. What an incredible, amazing book.

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal.

Unleashing and equipping people to effectively help the poor requires repentance and the realization of our own brokenness. When Helping Hurts articulates a biblically based framework concerning the root causes of poverty and its alleviation. A path forward is found, not through providing resources to the poor, but by walking with them in humble relationships.

Who are the poor? Should we do relief, rehabilitation, or development, and how can we help people effectively here and abroad. While the world has made strides in the fight against global poverty, there is a hidden crisis silently undermining our best efforts to help the poor. It is a plague of everyday violence. And like a horde of locusts devouring everything in their path, the unchecked plague of violence ruins lives, blocks the road out of poverty, and undercuts development.

How has this plague of violence grown so ferocious? The answer is terrifying, and startlingly simple: In one of the most remarkable — and unremarked upon — social disasters of the last half century, basic public justice systems in the developing world have descended into a state of utter collapse. This book is a powerful tool designed specifically for social, health, and legal services professionals. Redesign programs to better serve people you work with, build skill sets for management to help guide employees, upgrade training for front-line staff like receptionists, case workers, and managers.

Yet all too often, experts recommend solutions that fix immediate problems without addressing the systemic political factors that created them in the first place. Easterly argues that only a new model of development—one predicated on respect for the individual rights of people in developing countries, that understands that unchecked state power is the problem and not the solution —will be capable of ending global poverty once and for all.

Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England, has seemingly seen it all. Yet in listening to and observing his patients, he is astonished by the latest twist of depravity that exceeds even his own considerable experience. The key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims.

This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives. Record unemployment and rampant corporate avarice, empty houses but homeless families, dwindling opportunities in an increasingly paralyzed nation—these are the realities of 21st-century America, land of the free and home of the new middle class poor. Award-winning broadcaster Smiley and Dr. A Call to Conscience. As the middle class disappears and the safety net is shredded, Smiley and West, building on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

For more than 30 years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. More than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every year—most of them in Africa and most of them children. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse.

In the west we think of famine as a natural disaster, brought about by drought; or as the legacy of brutal dictators. But in this powerful investigative narrative, Thurow shows exactly how, in the past few decades, American, British, and European policies conspired to keep Africa hungry and unable to feed itself. As a new generation of activists work to keep famine from spreading, Enough is essential reading on a humanitarian issue of utmost urgency.

One of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century, Knut Hamsun made literary history with the publication in of this powerful, autobiographical novel recounting the abject poverty, hunger and despair of a young writer struggling to achieve self-discovery and its ultimate artistic expression.

Executive summary

The book brilliantly probes the psychodynamics of alienation and obsession, painting an unforgettable portrait of a man driven by forces beyond his control to the edge of self-destruction. Hamsun influenced many of the major 20th-century writers who followed him, including Kafka, Joyce and Henry Miller. Required reading in world literature courses. This book about two young men growing up in the Chicago projects is a modern classic of the genre. It took the author three years of reporting to tell their story. With this important work, he continues the stories of year-old Lafayette Rivers and his younger brother Pharoah as they confront tragedy on a daily basis.

For most people, the Great Crash of has meant troubling times. Not so for those in the flourishing poverty industry. These mercenary entrepreneurs have taken advantage of an era of deregulation to devise high-priced products to sell to the credit-hungry working poor, including the instant tax refund and the payday loan. Timely, shocking, and powerful, it offers a much-needed look at why our country is in a financial mess and gives a voice to the millions of ordinary Americans left devastated in the wake of the economic collapse. This is the story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years.

By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness — in a work of literary art that brilliantly captures a time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experience. Yunus is that rare thing: His dream is the total eradication of poverty from the world. In , against the advice of banking and government officials, Yunus established Grameen, a bank devoted to providing the poorest of Bangladesh with minuscule loans.

Grameen Bank, based on the belief that credit is a basic human right, not the privilege of a fortunate few, now provides over 2. This book is his story and it is inspiring. But considering its impact it deserves to be this high on the list. Hugo introduces one of the most famous characters in literature, Jean Valjean — the noble peasant imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread.

Within his dramatic story are themes that capture the intellect and the emotions: Polak, a psychiatrist, has applied a behavioral and anthropological approach to alleviating poverty, developed by studying people in their natural surroundings.

He argues that there are three mythic solutions to poverty eradication: As are many of the types of investments, tools and mechanisms to best reach them. The allocation of resources is ultimately a political act, shaped by competing political incentives. How successfully these are overcome during the next decade will be measured by how many people remain in extreme and other dimensions of poverty, how many people remain excluded from progress and for how long the gap between the poorest and the rest continues to grow. Including everyone in progress can no longer be a matter of rhetoric.

It must be measured. The imperative to leave no one behind means looking beyond averages to see who is left behind, globally and in every country. Any government, any business, any civil society organisation that claims to be contributing to inclusive progress should be required to measure impact. No data should increasingly mean no credibility. Sustainable Development Goal SDG 10 calls for faster-than-average growth for the poorest people to reduce inequality.

Social protection systems have a vital role in ending extreme poverty. What specific steps have been taken to deliver on the Agenda commitments to reach the people furthest behind first? How many more people now have the security of social protection? Investment strategies need to focus not only on where and who — but when. Front loading investments in immunisation is estimated to have averted 2. The consequences of poverty on lost education, stunted growth and lost years of life are irreversible. And as countries consider investment in growth, evidence suggests that the jobs and wealth of tomorrow increasingly depend on human capital investments in health, education and nutrition which open up choice and opportunity for people and countries.

Agenda and investments to end poverty Ending poverty requires a sustainable and comprehensive approach which will lift and sustain people above the poverty line while also ensuring they are more resilient to crisis and are able to benefit from opportunity and progress. If it were a matter of increasing income alone, this would be a more achievable challenge. Ending poverty, however, requires fundamental changes to the systems that will drive its end and the factors that perpetuate it, ensuring the people lifted out of poverty are then able to access services, fully participate in society and benefit from national and global growth.

In the poorest countries, nearly two decades into the millennium, poverty is still a matter of life and death. Forty million people, more than the population of Canada, will live or die depending on whether the world delivers on the promises agreed by countries in Many of the outcomes children growing up in poverty experience, including stunted growth and illiteracy, are not reversible; a child whose growth is stunted in their early years will likely remain disadvantaged. A lost education cannot be recovered, and the losses to the person and society are permanent. This is the reality behind the imperative to leave no one behind: Therefore, achieving the twin goals of SDG 1 ending poverty in all its forms everywhere and SDG 10 reducing inequality within and among countries , alongside the goals on nutrition, health and education, represents a more fundamental and universal challenge that requires new thinking on investments to end poverty.

It is an intellectual investment in a new mindset. The ambitions of the SDGs and Agenda are different and require a new universal perspective. Changes in policy and investment choices are needed in rich as well as poor places, and the responsibility to include the poorest people in progress is shared. For the poorest countries these imperatives mean investments to reach every last person — investments that will need external assistance.

On the global side, the first step is to see how well existing development approaches reflect the leave no one behind agenda. But domestically, new focus on identifying and prioritising groups of people who are especially difficult to reach will be vital. As this shift occurs, it is important to be mindful of other related changes in the way support for the poorest people is targeted and delivered. For example, as official development assistance ODA is increasingly delivered through diverse arms of government, it will be crucial for all agencies to engage with the imperative to leave no one behind.

This means not only development cooperation institutions, but other government ministries and institutions delivering financing and projects, including the private sector. Delivering on Agenda means not only thinking about the 17 SDGs in terms of what needs to be delivered. It means thinking about how the goals are delivered for everyone. It means looking beyond averages to see who is left behind, globally and in every country — because the factors that cause and perpetuate poverty and inequality are universal and reduce growth, well-being, choice and opportunity in every country. The logic of SDG 10 is clear and explicit — the incomes of people in poverty must grow faster than average if inequality is to be reduced.

But faster-than-average growth is not enough. That people are being left behind is not only a matter of income: This means growth and investment strategies in all sectors that identify who is excluded and specifically measure progress for different parts of the population.

To close the gap between the poorest people and the rest, the consumption floor must be raised. Simply put, this is the bare minimum — the lowest levels of income or consumption that can be seen in society. Reaching these people is a moral imperative, and it is also essential to deliver on the commitment to reach the people furthest behind first. If the floor stays the same, it is a mathematical certainty that the disparity between the very poorest people and everyone else will continue to increase. They will be left further behind. Reaching the people furthest behind first must mean urgent political attention, followed by action and resource allocation devoted to systematic efforts to raise the floor.

We also know from evidence accumulated over the last two decades of the effective contribution of social protection. Two statistics can illustrate the tip of a positive iceberg of evidence on the impact of social protection on reducing poverty:. Social protection programmes targeting the poorest people are the first step toward achieving SDG 1, not the last. But this leaves million people without any kind of social protection. In many sub-Saharan African countries, the role of aid in ensuring that governments can provide social safety nets is key.

Even in middle income countries such as Kenya and Ghana, donors fund respectively around a third and a fifth of social safety nets. In recent years, aid for social protection and welfare has occupied roughly a similar share of ODA as in the s Figure 1. Ensuring no one is left behind and that people do not fall into poverty will require more investment in social protection.

Furthermore, domestic governments need to be supported to plan for the transition of programmes from relying on donor funding to domestic funding in the medium to long term. Data reflects projects that may have focused on issues such as support for persons with disabilities without necessarily providing social protection. Claims are regularly made for processes and strategies which are inclusive — but unless we know who is included and who is not, these are largely meaningless. It should report on who benefits from the investment and where it is best placed — sectorally and geographically — to enable poorer people to take up opportunity as well as how it addresses the different types of asset deficits — human, physical, financial, social, and natural — that the poorest people experience.

Similarly, any investment which is claiming to contribute to the SDGs must specify which parts of the population it will benefit and monitor to whom, where and when the benefit is evident. A wasteful historic fissure over the almost six decades of aid and development cooperation has been between investment in economic development and investment in human well-being — as though there were little connection between the two. The capacity of social safety nets to enable investments in human capital is particularly important. To use a productivity lens, the only way to ensure that young people grow up equipped to find a livelihood and make an economic contribution tomorrow is to invest in human capital today.

Committing funds to human capital development can also safeguard against the impacts of poverty that are not reversible — stunting and lack of early years education, for example. Data gaps add substantially to uncertainty about who is being left behind. Many people are simply not counted in surveys, censuses and administrative data. Many censuses and surveys exclude certain populations as a rule, for instance, people living in institutions, homeless people, refugees, nomadic people and internally displaced persons. Estimates suggest that the systematic undercounting of urban populations could lead to distortions of population estimates by over million people.

There are also gaps in disaggregation and indicators relevant to particular populations. For instance, only recently have countries begun to capture data on disability using comparable questions that can reliably be used for disaggregation following the Washington Group on Disability Statistics. The World Bank is beginning to address issues of better disaggregating its poverty statistics with a promise to feature this subject in the upcoming Poverty and Shared Prosperity report.

Additionally, there are several countries where there has never been a survey that the World Bank has considered adequate for international comparisons. Here, too, there have been improvements. While Somalia has not had a full-scale poverty survey, there is a large programme to conduct High Frequency Surveys which provide less coverage and depth than standard surveys to better fill in data gaps. Finally, improved administrative data, civil registration and vital statistics systems hold real potential for providing sustainable data systems that can be disaggregated.

These systems can also provide better insights into who is benefiting most from government services. In the era of the data revolution, transparency and accountability mean that anyone who claims to be contributing to inclusive progress should be required to measure impact — which means identifying a baseline and generating distributional data. Organisations at all levels and in all sectors share responsibility for this; and for any organisation claiming an inclusive approach or a contribution to the SDGs, no data should increasingly mean no credibility.

Yet we cannot wait for these data limitations to be resolved before taking action. Some may be addressed more quickly than others, but it is a long-term investment. While there is still time to get back on track the time must be now. Based on the data that is available it is clear that, in the absence of action, many people and places will become even further left behind as global, national and local progress benefits some more than others. In the years leading up to the MDGs, poverty reduction was mostly achieved through progress in a few countries. Most countries saw economic growth and progress across a range of key indicators including maternal mortality and stunted growth.

Despite these general trends, not all countries and certainly not all people saw progress. Hundreds of millions of people still live in extreme poverty and while the share and numbers of the population in poverty has decreased across most regions, the number of people living in poverty has risen in sub-Saharan Africa. The available data shows that in this region, million people were living in extreme poverty in ; by this number had increased to million people.

Faster progress will be needed to ensure that no one is left behind. Economic growth has been a major driver for the progress seen, particularly in China and India. However, growth alone is not enough. Additionally, growth needs to translate into progress beyond monetary dimensions of poverty and beyond simply moving people above a low threshold with little to prevent them from falling below the line again.

Over the next decade extreme poverty is likely to be increasingly concentrated in a smaller number of countries, as well as in subnational regions within countries, many of which share common characteristics that may contribute to their vulnerability. Five years later, new projections show a best case of million and worst of million people.

Projections shown in this chart are for the middle-case scenario between best and worst cases. These projections suggest that growth will lead to dramatic progress in South Asia, primarily driven by India. By , million people in the region are projected to be lifted above the poverty line, with the best-case scenarios suggesting that virtually no one in South Asia will be living below the international extreme poverty measure in In fact, when considering trends in progress in human development indicators and political and economic insecurity alongside poverty projections, a select group of 30 countries — mostly in sub-Saharan Africa — emerge as being most at risk of being left behind.

While these countries are diverse, many are characterised by political and environmental insecurity, low levels of human development, weak governance systems and an underdeveloped private sector. They also sit among countries least able to generate or attract resource flows that could address a number of these challenges see Chapters 2 and 3. The difference in progress between South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa on numbers of people living below the poverty line is mainly because of the depth of poverty — poor people in sub- Saharan Africa are living much further below the international poverty line than poor people in Asia are.

But it is also due to factors such as conflict and political and environmental instability, which will continue to hold certain countries back. But poverty is not only about income. It is multidimensional and the SDGs require addressing all its dimensions. The report from the Multidimensional Poverty Index emphasises the depth of multidimensional poverty in both South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Based on data from poverty forecasting models, fragility rankings, human development indicators and environmental risk measures.

See Development Initiatives The challenge of leaving no one behind requires going far beyond national averages. It means focusing on individual people. To better understand who is at risk of being left behind, data needs to be disaggregated. One important dimension of exclusion is geography. People in one part of a country may feel fully integrated and benefit from access to services while people in another region may experience a very different economic, social and political reality.

National averages hide substantial variations in the distribution of poverty within countries. Even in countries identified as most at risk of being left behind, subnational poverty rates can vary substantially: This means that ending poverty is a challenge focused at the subnational as well as country level. It is becoming increasingly possible to understand current subnational distributions and trends of poverty and thus better inform medium-term policy and targeting. This report applies two measures to assess which regions within countries are facing intractable poverty and are most at risk of failing to end poverty by Unsurprisingly, data suggests that in the countries projected to be left behind at national level, the share of the population living in regions in that country that are considered at risk of being left behind is high.

For many countries, poverty is particularly concentrated in certain regions, states and districts. For other countries, notably those with some of the highest poverty rates, such as Madagascar and the DRC, poverty is widespread throughout the country. The urbanisation of poverty has been a particular concern in understanding where people in poverty are. Rural areas may face limited access to populations, increasing the costs of buying and selling goods on the market. Remote areas also may have lower access to technology, leading to less productive labour. And population centres generally exist to begin with because they hold economic advantages over the rest of the country.

To ensure all people are included in the SDGs, resources and policy need to be targeted, based on data and understanding about the people and groups who are not sharing in progress. People are and will be left behind for various reasons. This may be because they are geographically marginalised, living in remote and hard-to-reach areas with harsh climate and poor infrastructure. They may be deliberately invisible because they are likely to be oppressed.

They may be deliberately excluded because of ethnicity or religious identity. Overwhelmingly people may be left behind because of chronic deprivation and lack of human, political or economic capital. Many dimensions of exclusion are bound up in the identities of individual people. These characteristics are not captured in aggregate data. People living at the margins of society are also particularly likely to be missing from the data altogether; they may not be counted because of their citizenship status, or because of characteristics that have been stigmatised.

People who are homeless or children without parental care may simply not be counted because they are not in a household. Yet data analysis reveals one clear trend. People are much more likely to be living in extreme poverty if they are young or older. People in their forties are least likely to be extremely poor Figure 1. This is remarkably consistent across virtually every country.

The intersection of age and gender is also telling. The World Bank has found that girls under the age of 10 and women in their twenties and thirties are more likely to be poor. However, once they are in to their forties and beyond, they may be less likely to experience poverty. To better understand how ageing links to being left behind, analysis for this report compared the poverty rates disaggregated by age, applying similar methods to those used to calculate subnational poverty rates.

This suggests that older people and children have benefited least from global poverty reduction and are being left behind. Any delay can be measured in terms of women dying in childbirth, or children dying of diarrhoea or growing up stunted or illiterate. Acting now is not only the moral thing to do. The MDGs offer some lessons for accelerating human capital investment. This accelerated progress was evident in the poorest and therefore most challenging countries. One calculation puts the number of child deaths averted at 7. By contrast, education outcomes — while still significant with estimates of up to million more people completing primary school during the MDG era 42 — did not accelerate at the same pace.

Similarly, national investments in education have, among developing countries in aggregate, grown at a slower rate than those in health. Two innovations, the International Finance Facility for Immunisation and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, particularly contributed to this accelerated progress by frontloading investment and creating confidence among potential investors see Box 1. The International Finance Facility for Immunisation, or IFFIm, was proposed in 43 to allow immediate investments but financed over a longer term 44 based on the principle that the overall returns for reducing poverty will be greater, future costs prevented and lives saved.

This frontloading for immunisation has had a direct and indirect impact on human capital. First, the number of deaths averted has increased. The evaluation of IFFIm 45 concludes that at least 2. This increase in coverage is clearly valuable, but IFFIm has also increased impact:. The Global Fund, another well-known health initiative, accounts for a quarter of the growth in health ODA from donor governments and multilateral institutions. Beyond this it has managed to mobilise significant financing from other sources such as foundations and the private sector. Importantly, while much remains to be done, such as improving transitions in health financing from the Fund to domestic government institutions, the tide has turned on HIV and AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

The lessons for accelerated progress from the MDGs highlight ambitious, timebound goals, national implementation and a focus on results, standards and outcome metrics. The SDGs provide the shared agenda and shared framework with a clear timetable that should allow the progress on health to be replicated in other areas. The investments needed to end poverty and develop human capital go hand in hand with rigorous measurement on who is benefitting from each investment so that no one is left behind.

50 Best Books On Poverty

Women fleeing violence in the Central African Republic use sewing machines provided by the UN Women multipurpose centre to create and sell clothing in Gado refugee camp. Key messages The relevance and importance of aid is as great as ever.

Official development assistance ODA is unique in being able to target poverty directly. But moreODA needs to be mobilised, better targeted to the poorest people and countries, and better focused on the right mechanisms, channels, sectors and modalities that build human capital and strengthen institutions. Aid continuing to stagnate should not be accepted. Donors can, and are, making new commitments.

The proportion of ODA being transferred into countries has fallen significantly such that less than two thirds of gross ODA is actually allocated to a particular country. ODA is not benefiting the poorest populations nor the countries with the lowest government revenues proportionately to their needs. ODA focusing on specific vulnerabilities is not effectively targeting countries with the greatest needs. Climate change adaptation finance, for example, is not always going to countries known to be the most vulnerable.

The ways in which ODA is delivered has seen a shift towards loans and away from channels that can empower countries to lead their own development agenda. Almost a third of loans to low income countries went to nations deemed to be in debt distress or at high risk of being so. Investments in general budget support have fallen and aid not channelled via the public sector is mainly implemented by international rather than local actors. ODA is not consistently targeting the sectors most critical to the poorest people.

On aggregate, health and education spending is stagnating, while small volumes of aid to social protection is growing slowly and remains at just 1. Nor does the distribution of sector aid always reflect the needs of the poorest people: Development cooperation from government providers outside the OECD DAC has seen significant increases in recent years, though to maximise its potential in the wider concessional financing landscape, improved accountability and transparency remain key.

In recent years the development finance landscape has changed rapidly. While national public and commercial resources remain the primary source for development investments for many countries see Chapter 3 , total volumes of finance are increasing and the range of international finance available to many countries has expanded.

ODA is a comparatively small part of this growing mix and so many donors are starting to re-evaluate what its role can and should be. First and foremost, ODA will continue to be needed and it is important to move away from pervading pessimism about ODA stagnating with little scope to increase: As Chapter 3 argues, aid cannot be automatically substituted by other types of finance and the same outcomes achieved.

Crucially therefore, donors need to be more strategic about how ODA is spent. The scale and variety of non-ODA resources at the global scale creates more space for ODA to do what it does best — reach the people at greatest risk of being left behind. Apart from a decline during the s, ODA volumes have generally followed an upward trend since While ODA fell slightly in — the first drop in ODA levels since and when ODA fell in the aftermath of the global financial crisis — such crises come and go and should not undermine the counter-cyclical advantages of aid.

Major donors are taking steps to address this and setting new, specific and time-bound commitments to increase proportions of national income spent on aid. Despite this near-unanimous support from donors 47 years after the adoption of the UN resolution, just five DAC members disbursed at least 0. These newer donors joining the global development effort are typically newly industrialised countries without a long tradition of involvement in international development.

The impact that could be had if all donors followed those already reaching or pledging their commitment to 0. Projections of GNI are based on applying the average annual growth rate of GNI over — to each successive year from up to This will mean potentially significant changes in the reported volume of ODA will occur, without any change in donor spending.

This will also have implications for how donors perform against the 0. This will affect different donors in different ways — Japan, a significant provider of loans, will see its reported ODA rise as a result of these changes due to both the highly concessional nature of the loans they provide and the high volume of repayments that will no longer be discounted. Other donors, such as France and Germany, which give less concessional loans and which receive lower levels of repayments, may see their reported ODA reduce.

Some additional activities in this area will now be eligible to be classed as ODA. The existing rules do not allow for reporting of some activities that arguably have a development impact — such as loans to private sector entities that were less concessional than sovereign loans but still supported private sector development — and may have disincentivised investments in this area.

In future more of these activities will be counted as ODA, but the exact rules have yet to be agreed, so the impact on ODA levels is not yet clear. This would mean that any assistance being provided by donors to these countries would be counted as ODA. There is also debate around whether assistance to high income countries that suffer severe shocks such as the hurricane damage to some Caribbean island states in should be allowed to count as ODA, and currently no agreement among DAC members on this issue has been achieved.

ODA accounts for a wide range of activities, expenditures and investments and not all aid actually goes to developing countries — whether it never leaves the donor country a non-transfer, such as, for example, debt relief, costs for hosting students from developing countries, building development awareness, some administrative costs and in-donor refugee costs , or is not allocated to specific countries a transfer, but not to countries, for example investments in research, global initiatives, and regional aid.

When coupled with a significant volume of ODA being spent in donor countries non-transferred aid , a worrying trend can be seen. ODA going directly to countries is falling as a proportion of total ODA — with non-transfer and non-country allocated aid compounding one another. These trends need to be reversed if ODA is to address the needs of the poorest people first. The ODA that does result in transfers to specific countries is not always targeted at the poorest places.

The others, apart from Turkey, are all in Asia and the Middle East: ODA data shown is for and only refers to country allocable ODA to countries with poverty data available. When looking at ODA per poor person, it is far from shared equally among people in extreme poverty.

Considered in this way, ODA allocations appear regressive — with proportionately more resources per poor person going to the countries with the least poverty. Countries for which no poverty data is available have been excluded. Bands were identified in such a way as to contain as even as possible a number of countries within them. Less than 5, and 5,—50, bands are truncated on chart 2. There is significant variation in the government resources available in developing countries. Some ODA recipients only have a few hundred dollars or less per person to spend on providing services, infrastructure and governance in their countries; others have thousands of dollars per person in government revenues.

While more ODA does go to countries with less government resources, ODA disbursed to the low-revenue countries is not proportionate to the level of poverty in these countries. This reflects a similar picture to ODA disbursed based on extreme poverty levels. Countries for which no poverty data or government revenue per person data is available have been excluded. Another indication that ODA is not being targeted at countries with the greatest need is donors not prioritising the least developed countries LDCs.

LDCs are described by the UN as: ODA allocations should also consider where poverty is likely to persist in the future. Yet recent growth in ODA has mostly bypassed these countries. Other countries include other developing countries and regional and unspecified recipients. As highlighted in Chapter 1, poverty is multidimensional and many complex factors make people vulnerable.

This makes the targeting of issue-specific ODA important to understand. Climate change is one example — the relationship between climate change and poverty is now well known, yet it is not clear that this knowledge is translated into how and where climate-related ODA is allocated and whether it is effectively targeting the people who are most vulnerable to its effects. Many countries with relatively low levels of vulnerability received some of the largest amounts of adaptation-related ODA, including Turkey, Colombia and Jordan. Moreover, a very small proportion of their populations live in extreme poverty.

Amounts based on gross ODA disbursements. Includes ODA marked as principal and significant with the climate change adaptation policy marker. Regional and unspecified allocations are excluded. Includes only countries for which there is data available for poverty, ODA and vulnerability. There is not much variation between countries classed as having medium 18 or low 19 levels of vulnerability.

Furthermore, certain countries with high levels of vulnerability and relatively high levels of extreme poverty are not prioritised, for example Guinea-Bissau and Central African Republic. Such gaps and inequality in the distribution of adaptation-related ODA, considering patterns of vulnerability and poverty, reveal significant opportunity for DAC donors and multilateral institutions to improve the targeting of their climate-specific resources.

Various means often described as modalities or instruments are used to deliver ODA. Modalities describe how aid is managed and disbursed and can influence what, where and who is targeted. Yet there is little doubt that how aid is used matters almost as much as what aid is used for, with who and where. The global figures may also obscure important distinctions and variations at the level of each donor. Here the use of ODA as loans demonstrates those variations and the potential long-term impact on the poorest people. Just as gross ODA has fallen for a number of the poorest countries since , so grants directly to projects, a key modality for such countries, have also declined.

And when only grants allocated to specific countries or regions are considered thus excluding those that have no specific geographical focus , volumes have flatlined. However, as discussed in depth in this chapter, loans have also risen significantly.

Some equity investments in companies in developing countries, usually made by development finance institutions DFIs , are eligible to be counted as ODA. Since , tracking the use of these instruments has been complicated by some donors choosing to report capital sums into DFIs from donor governments as ODA, rather than the actual investments made by the DFIs.

Another important dividing line is whether the modality results in a transfer of real resources from the donor country and, as noted earlier, non-transfer ODA has been on the rise in recent years. Since this has fallen by 2. The most significant trend over the last decade has been the increasing use, by some large donors in particular, of concessional loans as a way of delivering aid. Loans now make up almost a quarter of total ODA, growing three times faster than other ODA modalities combined from to Figure 2. Japan has long been the lead provider of ODA loans among the DAC donors, however Germany, France and Korea have rapidly expanded their lending programmes between three and five-fold between and Institutions of the EU, the only multilateral donor that is a member of the DAC, increased levels of ODA loans by a factor greater than 40 over the same period.

Crucially, the rise in loans in recent years has been evenly spread across countries of different income groups, with no significant changes in the proportion of loans going to any particular income group between and This means many countries with high poverty levels and low government revenues are receiving large amounts of ODA loans. As well as being delivered in a variety of modalities, ODA is channelled by and through a complex network of agencies and actors.

Most donors have a dedicated aid agency or development specialists in foreign affairs ministries to disperse ODA. However, certain donors such as the UK are making a conscious effort to push spending increasingly via other departments. With growing emphasis on the role of the private sector in promoting development, it is expected that bilateral DFIs may in future account for a larger proportion of ODA see Chapter 3. This may include core funding carried over from previous years or, in the case of development banks, amounts drawn from profits on lending activities.

Over half of all ODA is channelled via public sector institutions. For aid not channelled via the public sector, the great majority is implemented by international rather than local actors. These proportions of total ODA have remained almost static since comprehensive data became available as channel of delivery began to be reported by donors in Donors and implementing agencies have committed to providing more humanitarian funding as directly as possible to local and national actors who are regularly the first to respond in humanitarian crises.

The channel of delivery refers to the first implementing partner of the ODA disbursement, which has implementing responsibility over the funds. There are variations in aggregate totals when looking at different sets of countries, with less ODA to countries at risk of being left behind being channelled through government institutions than is the case for other countries.

In fact, the proportion of ODA channelled via the public sector in countries being left behind has declined noticeably since To some extent this is unsurprising as the poorest and most vulnerable countries may have weaker government institutions, if present at all, via which ODA can be administered. However, this is not the case for all countries being left behind, some politically fragile countries may have functioning subnational institutions.

Yet their low levels of government revenue make ODA channelled via their government institutions all-the-more vital if they are to be empowered to lead their own development agendas. Data is for ODA supports a wide range of activities and health, infrastructure and governance-related sectors consistently receive the largest amounts.

Chart is indexed from showing percentage rise in humanitarian aid and all other ODA for subsequent years. Focusing in on development ODA, a broad range of sectors receive significant amounts of aid, with notable trends related to a number of the sectors that should be the greatest priorities to ensure no one is left behind. This means the share of total ODA going to education slipped from 8. Other social services social services excluding health and education saw the slowest growth, with spending rising well below the rate of ODA as a whole.

Although there is no data specifically on ODA to social protection, ODA to social and welfare services, a subdivision of other social services that largely comprises spending on social protection, is tracked. Data on ODA support for social protection programmes may improve in coming years as the OECD has updated its data to allow donors to track spending on social security, pensions and other social protection schemes in the form of cash or in-kind benefits.

This is particularly pertinent since the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation made country ownership one of its stated principles for effective development. Chart excludes humanitarian assistance, in-donor refugee costs, debt relief, other commodity assistance, multisector ODA and ODA not specified to a sector. When focusing in on different countries, there are clear variations from the aggregate trends on sector allocations. Many of these variations are to be expected. However, looking at sectors that are particularly significant to ensuring the people furthest behind are lifted out of poverty, there are some surprising trends.

The poverty bands were drawn for each group to contain similar amounts of total ODA to allow the analysis to demonstrate that differences in total volumes are not the main source of any differences in sector allocations. With increasing focus on donors attracting private sector investment in developing countries, it is also important to acknowledge trends in ODA spending on business and industry in developing countries.

At present countries with the lowest levels of poverty are receiving large amounts of ODA targeted at these sectors, meaning investments are primarily targeting where there is the least risk and greatest chance of receiving a profitable return. If this is the case, it should incentivise donors to redeploy ODA to countries and sectors that are otherwise underfunded.

Focusing in on the countries being left behind, allocations are largely as expected. Humanitarian aid and health dominate. They comprise almost half of gross ODA received and account for the largest increases see Figure 2. Meanwhile the proportion of ODA allocated to infrastructure, business and industry is substantially lower than for other countries. Similarly, the trend in education follows the same surprising disparity seen when comparing countries based on income poverty levels.

In fact, the amount being allocated to education in countries being left behind is falling. Another worrying trend is the decline in general budget support. A number of countries being left behind are characterised by fragility and political insecurity. This reflects trends of funding to fragile states more widely, where commitments in these areas have largely stagnated since Percentages on chart will not total to due to the exclusion of ODA to debt relief, general budget support and other sectors including donor admin costs and refugee hosting costs on the chart.

It is therefore important to acknowledge these volumes alongside ODA as, while classified differently, their purpose is aligned. Composition of data and definitions of development cooperation can vary by provider. Data remains sparse, patchy and incomplete for much South—South cooperation and volumes may be underestimated. There are also significant challenges in assessing where it is going, what it is being spent on and what impact it is achieving. While volumes are smaller than ODA or other resources such as foreign direct investment, they are clearly rising and these actors are likely to play an increasing role in the future.

Welcome to Investments to End Poverty 2018

Key messages All actors will benefit from achieving the Sustainable Development Goals SDGs and have a responsibility to contribute towards them. Investing to end poverty and close the gap between the poorest people and places and the rest is not just about scaling up total resources, but also the right types of finance for the right interventions. Increasing one type of finance will not automatically substitute the need for another. International financing often bypasses countries that need it most — those with the lowest domestic capacity and highest levels of poverty: Countries at most risk of being left behind receive a quarter of the flows per capita going to other developing countries excluding ODA.

The private sector will be key, but poor people cannot wait for international commercial investments — currently concentrated in countries with low risk and healthy business environments — to shift towards them. International financial and development finance institutions providing blended finance and de-risking are equally constrained from working in the poorest and most vulnerable places and will need changes to mandates to start mobilising resources to where they are needed most.

Beyond volumes, identifying synergies between types of finance, by knowing what resources are available and how they are being used, can maximise impact and free up scarce ODA. National public finance and ODA will continue to be central to investments directly focused on strengthening human capital development, which are being left behind by other forms of finance.

Comparable subnational data across resources is limited but shows the gap in access to resources between the poorest people and others at local level. Better production, availability and use of local data can help guide where different resources are needed most. All resources have a role to play in, and a responsibility to contribute to, leaving no one behind ODA, while critical in its ability to target poverty directly, will not be enough to meet the ambitions of the Agenda for Sustainable Development Agenda ; it is far from the largest resource flow available and arguably not the most important.

Nor will the economic growth that resulted in achieving Millennium Development Goal MDG 1 early be sufficient if poverty is to be ended and inequality reduced. In the SDG era, all resources — public, private, local, national and international — have a role. They also have a responsibility to contribute to the universal goals. The gains made by achieving them will be felt by all, rich and poor, individual, household, corporation and government. Shared benefits mean shared ownership of shared objectives — and shared responsibilities.

But it is not just about numbers — it is more than a question of scaling up total financing. Simply increasing investments in developing countries will not result in the progress needed to achieve the twin SDGs 1 and 10, nor the other SDGs addressing human capital, infrastructure, security and the environment on which these two depend. The quality of investments, backed up by political will driving the right choices, will also matter: While more financing is needed, it has to be the right type. This means it cannot be assumed that increasing one type of resource will be an automatic substitute for another.

Looking beyond numbers means looking at the efficiencies and additional impact to be gained from different types of finance, and the actors that control them, working together, either within a defined framework of sequencing or layering, or a more loosely defined approach grounded in clear awareness of what other resources there are and what they are doing. Within a burgeoning range of often interconnected sources, types, and modalities of funding and finance, each with their own sets of objectives, incentives and comparative advantages, strengthening their complementarity and building synergies will be as important as overall volumes.

Donors and governments need to know where their scarce concessional finance can make the most difference in the absence of other sources of investment. And other diverse actors need to know where opportunities are that both meet their own objectives and build momentum towards the SDGs. Having a clear picture of the overall landscape, including what type and scale of financing is being invested where, on what and at whose benefit, is thus a crucial step to more effective and impactful investments to end poverty.

Domestic resources are the primary source of finance in developing countries and will be the key driver in country-level investments to end poverty. China accounts for the vast majority of this difference, but even when excluding China the differences are impressive, with domestic public resources accounting for over nine times the volume of international official financing, and domestic commercial resources estimated by domestic credit to the private sector accounting for over seven times the volume of international commercial inflows to developing countries.

Combined, these domestic resources are 12 times those of international flows to developing countries. Data is for the most recent available year across all categories; this is , except for private finance mobilised via blending included in international commercial estimates and private development assistance included in international private estimates.

Commercial resources are the largest category of financing in both domestic and international investments and flows Figure 3. Notably, large proportions of international commercial resources ultimately flow out of developing countries. Data is for , except for private finance mobilised via blending and private development assistance. Development cooperation from other government providers includes data on disbursements of development cooperation from non-DAC members that report to the OECD DAC as well as data on disbursements of development cooperation from other government providers that do not report to the OECD DAC and for which data was compiled from national sources.

Domestic public resources are by far the largest development finance flow that can be invested directly in reducing poverty and be redistributive in nature through, for example, investments in social protection, health and education. Domestic public resources are managed by governments who hold ownership over national development agendas.

They are responsible for aligning their expenditure with domestic development priorities and can strengthen accountability between decision-makers and the people that development efforts are supposed to serve. Growth, however, has not been equally distributed across countries. Growth has almost halved since compared with the previous five years from an average annual growth rate of 7. Meanwhile it has not kept pace with economic growth — government revenue as a share of GDP has fallen across developing countries excluding China since , while levels in advanced economies have remained relatively constant in aggregate.

Countries whose government revenue data is not available for entire span of — are not included. Absolute volumes of domestic public resources are also lowest where poverty is highest.

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