Gathering Places
Gathering Places
[FOCUS ON ASIA-PACIFIC] MICRONESIA and Papua New Guinea are training young people, especially women and outer islanders, to help them find jobs. The Marshall Islands is piping clean water to more people. Samoa and Papua New Guinea are providing loans to rural entrepreneurs to start small businesses.
ADB aims to reduce
poverty in Asia-PacificIn Asia, a rural electrification program promotes growth in impoverished northern Bangladesh, where four out of five people have no electricity. Power enables irrigation pumps to lift crop production, women to rear chickens and schoolchildren to do homework.
These projects, supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), reflect two approaches to helping the poor in Asia and the Pacific. One is to provide assistance directly to groups of poor people, the other to promote economic growth that yields indirect benefits to the poor.
ADB is a partnership of 59 developed and developing countries committed to bringing capital and expertise to Asia and the Pacific to improve the lives of 900 million people who live on a $1 a day or less. Poorer countries obtain access to low-interest, long-term loans, while donor countries gain business opportunities through projects worth $6 billion a year.
Why should Americans care?
It is unacceptable that, in the new millennium, vast numbers of people still live in wretched poverty. Two-thirds of the world's poor live in Asia and it is in the interests of the United States that the Asia-Pacific region is a stable and peaceful part of the world that gives its people a promising future.
The United States benefits from ADB membership in two ways. First, it engages the region through a multilateral approach. Second, ADB projects yield numerous opportunities for American business.
THE UNITED STATES is a strong supporter of ADB's overarching goal of poverty reduction. ADB is committed to halving the proportion of very poor people by 2015. ADB seeks to reduce poverty in Asia and the Pacific by half within the same time.
This is a daunting task but, as experts at a recent Asia-Pacific Forum on Poverty hosted by ADB agreed, it is achievable -- provided that Asian countries, particularly those affected by the financial crisis, can implement reforms.
ADB's poverty reduction strategy rests on three pillars: sustainable growth, social development, rating employment. Growth expands public revenues that can be used for better infrastructure and social services.
Growth alone, however, is not sufficient to eliminate poverty. Social development and the elimination of gender disparity are also important. So is the nature and quality of governance. Good governance ensures the transparent use of public funds, promotes effective delivery of public services and helps to establish the rule of law, especially the enforcement of contractual and property rights. Since the poor depend heavily on basic services in the public sector -- such as health and education -- weak governance can affect them the most.
ADB activities also produce an enabling environment for private business, which generates markets and jobs and relieves pressure on public budgets. Private investment in developing countries is encouraged by forming public-private partnerships.
FOR EXAMPLE, ADB coordinated a deal between the Philippine government and a private firm to provide drinking water to 68,000 low-income families.
ADB is working on a strategy for social protection to reduce risks for the most vulnerable groups, including the unemployed, women, children, the elderly and victims of natural disasters.
The Asian financial crisis showed that inadequate social protection systems exposed people to excessive risk, increased the incidence of poverty and threatened to undermine human capital investments.
A PROJECT IN Indonesia helps female street children who are often victims of abuse. The project, run with non-governmental organizations, provides girls, who make up 20 percent of Indonesia's 170,000 street children, counseling as well as health and medical care.
Given the daunting challenges facing Asia and the Pacific, greater cooperation is essential between governments, international agencies, civil society and the private sector to achieve a common vision for eradicating poverty.
Karti Sandiya is regional representative in ADB's North American office.