Poverty reduction

The most important aspect in fighting poverty is to ensure that once one emerges out of its vicious cycle one is helped to keep out of it on a permanent basis. And that what makes the issue of sustainability of the poverty reduction initiatives the prime concern to those that are seized with the issue of alleviating poverty in the country. And indeed this was the focus of a roundtable discussion at The Daily Star on Saturday on the impediments to ensuring poverty alleviation programmes are seen through in order to deliver.
However, the issue of sustainability of poverty reduction programmes is largely predicated on a number of factors, several of which emerged from the discussions that we feel the policy planners should factor in while formulating strategies in this regard.
It is very important that we do not waste time in grappling with the definition of poverty but instead take it for what it is, that it is a state of deprivation of resources; and it must be acknowledged that poverty is not a singular construct but that there are various strands of it with inequality cutting not only vertically but also horizontally.
One must also take a very critical look at the issue of social safety nets. Admittedly, this arrangement exists in various forms even in affluent countries. But given that there are more than eighty social safety nets programme running in Bangladesh, these being merely a stop gap or holding action programme that simply maintains the status quo. But the effort should really be to help the poor graduate out of poverty. In other words, the programmes must be geared towards their becoming a part of the income generating process by making them a subject of the programme and not its object.
It must also be recognised that no initiative can be successful unless it is dovetailed to the national anti-poverty plan and for which the issue must be shorn of political colour and tackled as a national concern where the ownership of the strategy and the programmes that will help operationalise the strategy is shared by all cutting across party line.