Blog Question #11

There are many indigent countries in the world that have gotten to the state they are in for many different reasons. Because there is not one single issue that brings a country into impoverishment, I believe that it takes a combination of factors to bring a country out of impoverishment. There are two major actions/requirements that a country needs to follow to get out of poverty. The first major requirement is to have a good leader. If the leader of a country is corrupt, that’s a very harmful situation because he/she doesn’t care about the people of that country. Then usually neither basic needs nor the larger issues are being addressed in that country. Usually all or a huge percentage of the country’s money will be “pocketed” instead of going to programs that would help the people. To pull a country out of poverty the country needs a leader who cares about the people. A leader like this will do two things: first, use government money in various means to directly help the people with basic needs, and, second, the leader will work with the government to create better infrastructure in the country.

The second major action to be taken by impoverished countries is to fix specific issues about the country. This includes anything that might be stunting development or the market, such as something quite obvious like improving infrastructure or slightly more complicated like figuring out ways to increase tourism. A boost to infrastructure includes improvements or maintenance to roads or rail lines that would link internal parts of the country or go close to a border so that trade could be facilitated quite easily. Professor Jackson said something that I believe is very telling. He told us in class that it’s very difficult to find flights between African capitols that don’t go through Europe. This probably has an impact on the tourism industry in Africa. I think that if countries could get direct flights to one another’s capitals without going through another continent, which takes time and money, tourism might be increased. And this would bring revenue to any country. This is just one example of how addressing broader issues in poor countries may be as important as addressing issues of basic needs.

So, in conclusion, no one factor brings a country into poverty so no one factor can bring it out of poverty. So a country’s basic needs must be met but the way to do that is to create jobs and stability by addressing broader structural issues. It takes leadership to find solutions for providing basic needs and it takes addressing broader issues to fund those solutions. I think that if countries start to follow the ideas stated here, that well, it won’t be an immediate fix, but there will be relief to the impoverishment over time.