Poverty has always been described to me as a major problem in places like Africa. They described it as a barren wasteland with no access to water. I’ve always thought that up to this very day. I’m honestly shocked to learn that we have held Africa back as much as we have. My father explained to me growing up that if Africa had more valuable resources like oil, then we would care more about it like we did with Saudi Arabia. I thought it was a land of no opportunity, and the people living there were just stuck as they had no means to make anything of themselves. I literally joked with my friends that the way to solve their poverty was to move where the water was. I see now how wrong I really was, and I regret these words. Places like Haiti were held back by our own negligence and the industry of aid which we helped create, and it is time for us to withdraw and let these places develop on their own. Now this doesn’t mean abandoning Africa to its own devices, but instead of lending them free things we should give them opportunities for jobs to create there. To emphasize on this more, I don’t want us to go their and create jobs per say, but to use the people located there for work and help them expand their own businesses, creating jobs there isn’t a bad idea though.
We Are Not Helping
In the documentary Poverty Inc., we’re shown various examples of entrepreneurs and researchers who both suggest that the aid provided by other countries to Haiti is what caused their eventual downfall when a natural disaster nobody could have accounted for happened. The aid created a generation of laziness and a feeling of despair. The laziness came from not having to work to provide for themselves, and the feeling of despair came from people like the entrepreneurs who cannot compete with their government or the system as nobody will value their product when the market is flooded with ‘free’ products. I’ll compare this relationship these 3rd world countries have to 1st world countries with real parenting style covered in health classes. This style of parenting is known as indulgent parenting, and it’s a terrible way to parent. Indulgent parenting gives and gives and gives to a child, never disciplining them and letting them have whatever they desire. It leads to immature and spoiled behavior, and leads to the development of a conniving or sneaky behavior. This is because the child is given a power complex in which they rule over everything, do nothing, and still get rewarded. If you were to see someone’s child behaving like this you could identify the traits and determine it’s not a healthy way of life, as the child is completely dependent on whoever takes care of them. If we were to look at 1st world countries as the parent and the 3rd world countries as the child, we can see unhealthy relationships begin to form. To make matters worse, the problem wasn’t exclusive to Haiti. The same thing has also happened in Africa. So many outreach programs advertise and address the need to send aid to Africa. I’ve lived my entire life ‘knowing’ about the difficulties of life there and deeming our aid the only possible way to save Africa; however, the Rwandan Prince himself said that “…more aid leads to more aid and less independence for the people receiving the aid.” Aid is a controlled market in Africa, as providing aid is literally like having a grasp on the governments there. The Soft Tribe, a software business in Africa, couldn’t compete with another British company who funded the government with money for them to bid for the British business. This legal ‘bribery’ led to the British company hiring Soft Tribe to end up doing the work anyways, and getting less money than if they were to take the contract on themselves. In this kind of system all we’re doing is putting the recovery and development of a country down. To help these people, we need to leave them alone.
How To Help
The ways to help these countries are very simple. We need to let the affected countries develop and work together to solve their own problems, and we stop providing all the aid we’re lending out, as it just makes the entire system dependent on other countries. Bringing awareness of this matter to light is another good step, as I had no clue this was still an ongoing issue. It’s likely helped lead to recent events like the riots in South Africa and so forth. Withdrawing from their system and removing foreign aid is the starting point for these countries to begin to develop and create jobs and a beneficial way of life for themselves. Pulling out will help these countries on their journey to become 1st world countries. Now, there is a market in aid, and not only that but it looks good for businesses too. Bringing light to the matter will help decrease the beneficial look of aid, and to break the market for aid we will have to lobby against the companies providing it and/or boycotting the companies providing this aid. Until people are enlightened, this process will be extremely hard. After we withdraw, we will need to help the citizens of these countries secure their own security with rights to pursue life, liberty, and property. These essentials will set the citizens up for a successful future. Everything will stem from these root points; we just need to make it possible for them to be conceived.
Conclusion
The solution is to just let places stricken with poverty develop by themselves. In times of need it’s okay to send aid, but by sending aid all the time dependence is created. We don’t want dependence to be a factor for developing countries, it leads to an unhealthy lifestyle for both the countries and the citizens in these countries. We were once a developing country too, and we didn’t take aid 24/7. Sure, times were different and providing aid wasn’t widely resorted too, but the example stands that if the U.S. could develop without aid, then so too can 3rd world countries. I sort of feel like a villain trying to take away all that is good-natured in the world saying this, but there is evidence to support this view. To help end poverty, we need to limit aid and allow the natural process of society to form.
