7 News Belize

Redefining Poverty For Technocrats
posted (June 4, 2019)
It's the Ministry with the biggest name, the Human Development, Social Transformation and Poverty Alleviation - and they have a very big job - trying to unravel all the forces that create and perpetuate the spiraling poverty rate in Belize.

This week, they are hosting the fourth event in the 2018-2019 Social Protection Conferences Series. The conference is being held under the theme "Poverty: Dollars to Dimensions" and we found out that it's all about adding depth to the understand go poverty: what it is, and what drives it:...

Mark Antrobus, Social Planner Min. Human Dev.
"Our official poverty definition is purely about expenditure. it's about money. if you only measure poverty from an expenditure or income, the only way you can reduce those figures is by spending more money, or giving people more money. So if we then look at housing, or education, or health, it's easier to put programs or interventions in place that help people stay in education longer, to access better healthcare of have better housing."

Monica Pinilla-Roncancio, Oxford Poverty And Human Dev. Initiative
"The unidimensional or income poverty measures usually measure available income that a country has. But when you are having a multi dimensional poverty, you're including dimensions of deprivations that other people recognize as important. For example, access to health or education. So what it's going to change is that the government is going to have more information in order to plan policies to reduce poverty. Not all poor people are just poor because of income, they are poor because they don't have access to health, children are not going to school, children don't have food to eat, they don't have good quality food. So with a multi dimensional poverty index, you can identify those deprivations."

Mark Antrobus
"So, over the next two years, we're gonna ask the people what it means to them. So we actually did this over the last two months, so some of the presentations yesterday were presentations on what people had told us that their lives are when they are living in poverty. And we looked at different groups of people., so we asked the elderly, we asked children, we asked disabled, we asked a lot of different people and said "what is it like to live in poor, vulnerable situations?"

Jules Vasquez
"How do we improve that severe power imbalance, which is a function of being poor, that you have no power over your environment, or over actions that are taken against you?"

Mark Antrobus
"And that came out strongly in our consultations over the last couple months. People feel hopeless; ahm, the children were much more expressive. Ahm, but adults said, you know, this is my life and there's very little I can do to change my circumstances. And it's something I don't think we have a good answer for at the moment."

The five-day conference is being held in Belize City (June 3-4) and Belmopan (June 5-7).

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