Poverty in the Developing World

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes]

My Lords, it is wonderful that we are having a debate on this subject, and I have great admiration for those who are going to take that active part. I am one of the more lazy Members of the House who will, like many others, be willing to support the project but not to live on £1 a day, which sounds a real effort. I am waiting to see how it goes.

My only real experience with poverty came about because I was asked, quite by accident, to become chairman of Plan UK, an international body which helps the poorest of the poor. Baroness Blatch was to have become the chairman but, as she became a Minister, she persuaded me to agree to do it. I was fortunate to be its chairman for 12 years. When I took over we were raising £2.5 million a year in the UK and by the time I left it was £26 million. I also have the current figures: £41 million in the UK and over £400 million worldwide. So it produces quite a lot of help for people. We also know how many other charities and NGOs work very hard. Many of these schemes are operated with one another, so that various NGOs work together.

The thing is, though, that unless you supervise the work that is done in these countries, it can often be wasted effort. I visited one country where we were helping to put in a new water supply that brought water from the top of a hill down to the bottom. The people themselves were building the channels to do this. Previously, when their own local government had built the channels, everyone had dug holes in the sides and taken the water out as it came down, so the people at the bottom got nothing. However, when the people built it themselves, and it was their project and their ownership, they were determined to see that it continued to work.

Giving people the opportunity to do things, and often giving them the technical help that is needed, is a good thing. I saw in an African country a flat-pack school building that had been sent by some European country. No one had ever opened the pack or known what to do with it. It was nothing to do with the plan. It was just unused, because no one had provided an engineer to tell them how to put it together and advise them on what to do. Children were still sitting and having their lessons outside where they loved the distraction of everything around them.

All these things come as quite a shock to you when you see them. In Ecuador I visited a swamp where the houses were built on stilts. When we asked these people, particularly the women, “Why have you come and settled here in the middle of this dreadful swamp?”, they said, “For a better life”. It makes you realise just how bad their lives must have been.

In Tanzania a child was sitting by a hole in the ground with a bucket and a little thing like a yoghurt cup. Every few minutes, there would be one little cup of water to put into the bucket. We helped them to put in a pump. Now even a small child can, with their own ability, pump enough water to have a bucketful in no time. These are the things that are so important.

It is also important to give people the opportunity to help themselves. If you give a woman two chickens, as we did in many countries, they turn that into a poultry business. Those women sold their eggs and bred more chickens—they were in business. In South America, particularly in Bolivia, where people were rebuilding shattered homes, I saw people there enter into microfinance in such a way that there was a rotating fund; the woman who got the first amount of money started up her little business, perhaps then a market stall, and she was then able to move that money back into the system by repaying her loan and another woman got the money.

It has been mentioned that women are terribly important. Someone asked, “How do you choose between women and health?”, but it is not a choice—both go together. If you educate the women, they are capable of ensuring better health standards for their children. In the Philippines I saw women whose homes had been burnt down, and we were helping them. They used to go and pay off a little bit of mortgage every day, because every day they earned a small amount of money and could afford to take a few pence out of that to meet their debts. Women have a marvellous record of meeting their debts and of helping others on the way to improving things. In all the shanty towns that you see, it is the women who have brought their children and families to the outskirts of the big cities—I have seen this particularly in Latin America—because that is how they can get a job, and they can gradually see their family rise and have opportunities.

There are so many things that I could go on and on about. A basic hut in Vietnam was blown down, and we helped the woman build a new one. She was a widow with seven children, and she was so grateful for what we would consider a garden shed—except that we had put in a concrete floor. She explained that that floor meant that she would now have one-third more food for her children than she had before. When she had an earth floor, insects used to come up out of the earth and take away one-third of her stored grain.

The only thing on which I did not agree with the noble Lord when he opened the debate was the cycle of despair. I understand, and I thought that the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, made this point very clear, that statelessness must cause this sort of situation—I am sure that crises, particularly conflicts, can do it—but I have been amazed by how unbelievably cheerful these people were, living in poverty at a level that you could hardly imagine. They were grateful for any help, but they were optimists. They were all looking to improve life if they could. It makes you feel rather ashamed that you have so much and they have so little.

The noble Lord also mentioned tax measures and tax avoidance. I think that you will never get rid of tax avoidance, but gift aid is enormously valuable. He mentioned that there is now an internationally agreed standard. One of the essentials is to be sure that the money really goes to the people you want it to go to. The element of corruption still exists and can take money away from people. I remember a woman from Tanzania, speaking at a women’s meeting at the United Nations, who said, “Don’t give us money; if you give us money, we never see it. Give us soap and we’ll be able to wash our children”. This is what we have to realise: unless we can supervise what is happening, unless we have a monitoring system of some sort to see that the help really goes where it is needed, it will be very difficult.

There is hope for people. They are uncomplaining, they are optimists and they manage with so little in life that it makes us feel humble to be aware of this. I know that we all want to do whatever we can to help.