The Bottom Billion - moving people out of poverty

I have just finished reading "The Bottom Billion, Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can be Done About It" by Paul Collier. It has been an interesting read on global poverty. The book focuses on the poorest of the poor countries who have gone unnoticed by the West. Collier contends that the causes of the failure of these countries can be attributed to several traps including extraction and exportation of natural resources, civil wars and bad governance and that aid and globalization can hinder rather than help these countries climb out of poverty.

A couple of Paul's comments really resonanted with me and with the work we are doing in Kenya through The Ronnie Fund. Paul says, "...development is about giving hope to ordinary people that their children will live in a society that has caught up with the rest of the world. Take that hope away and the smart people will use their energies not to develop their society but to escape from it - as have a million Cubans. "

Collier goes on the further explain the impact of the migration of educated people from developing countries - that globalization has led to emigration of the brighest and best skilled and knowledgeable people leading to skills shortages in the poorest countries hindering the development process. Collier notes, "This all adds up to a depressing picture of what globalization is doing for the bottom billion. To get a chance to play in the global economy, you need to break free of the traps, ... in order to turn a country around it helps to have a pool of educated people, but the global labor market is draining the bottom billion of their limited pool of such people."

We realize that education is the key to improving quality of life and we especially support those like Ronnie Mdawida who pursue further education and then pass that information on to others or use their newly gained skills and knowledge to create a better quality of life for their countryman instead of leaving their homeland for greener pastures abroad. I think Collier nails it on the head when he says, "In every society of the bottom billion there are people working for change, but usually they are defeated by the powerful internal forces stacked against them. We should be helping the heroes. So far, our efforts have been paltry: through inertia, ignorance, and incompetence, we have stood by and watched them lose."

In poor countries across our planet there are heroes like Ronnie Mdawida in Kenya, young men and women with dreams of making their country a better place to live, to lift their fellow humans out of poverty and achieve quality of life. We salute, encourage and support those individuals to keep believing in their dreams and we along with others who share a belief in common justice and human rights will help, in respectful ways, to make those dreams a reality.