BYAMUKAMA: Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa: Are we treating the symptoms or the root causes (I)?

They work as hard as anyone else in the world but why are Africans still poor?

By Emmanuel Byamukama, Ames, Iowa

Recently, I attended a round table discussion on poverty, this having been part of the poverty awareness week at ISU. Three speakers opened up the discussion by sharing their experience in various projects they are involved in; helping communities live better lives in developing countries.

There was the engineer, who has designed cheap easy to use implements to purify water (project based in Ghana). The other discussant was an education psychologist, looking at how education can help in reducing poverty (Project based in India). The third discussant was a communication specialist, who is looking at attitudes and perceptions of poor people and how best to help them (project based in Uganda).

Having been brought up in rural area, I thought I could share my thoughts on poverty in a rural setting, particularly in Uganda, where I come from.

First of all, poverty is relative. In any community, there will be people who are extremely poor, but also a few who are well off. Webster dictionary defines poverty as “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions". I once heard a story about two people who grew up as the poorest in their families. The first one said “Men!, we were so poor so much that our family car had holes, we could see road through the holes”. The other one said, “For us, we walked whenever we needed to go places”!

Second, I want to say that rural people work very hard. In a rural village, people wake up early, on average 7am. They have no breakfast and will head to the garden to farm. They will use rudimentary tools (hand hoe, “pangas”, forked hoes) to prepare land for planting, weeding and harvesting. They will toil in the field till about mid-day. Then they head home prepare lunch (from scrap, nothing like stored food), rest a little and go back to the garden in the evening. So in terms of hours of work, rural people really work hard. Plus this work is real physical drudgery.

So then one wonders, if people work hard in rural areas, why are they still poor? There are a number of reasons. First, the crops grown are on a small scale. Because farmers grow a bit of everything on a small parcel of land, it is hard to grow on a larger scale. Well, why don’t they grow one crop and on large scale? This is partly because they don’t want to risk with one crop in case of failure and limited land. Plus, even when they grow one crop, it wouldn’t sell so well to provide money to cater for other food needs in a home. Why are prices low? Prices are low because of supply and demand! In a rural village everybody is a producer and there are very few consumers. In my opinion, this is a major challenge. This is where 80% of the population are producers. Therefore there is high supply that exceeds demand. People are doing same things. This is different in developed countries, where about 2% of population depend primarily on agriculture for employment.

Rural dwellers are poor because they do not produce goods for sale. What is produced is consumed by the producers, hence no value added. No processing, transportation, packaging, or branding. These activities would add value, create jobs and improve prices and limit supply. The supply problem is exacerbated by the fact that timing and harvesting of the crops happens at the same time. So you have basically flooding of the market with the same goods, therefore the few buyers will determine they price they want to offer, which should be the reverse.

Then again, life in the rural areas is reduced to food. Produce food this season, eat it, next season produce again, and so on. But life is not about food only! One needs clothes, good education for the children, health care and good housing. So what happens in a rural area where these basic needs are not met? The rural poor are aware of these needs, no one doesn’t like good things. But challenge is that they kind of become ‘used’ to their conditions and seem to relax. I mean a grandpa was poor, his son lived in the same conditions, now even the grandchild.

They are living on same land that has been cultivated for many years without replenishing the fertility. When things become really worse, for example by the time the third generation starts to use this little piece of land, which was an inheritance from the parents, this land is so small to sustain this growing population. The third generation in a family usually will decide to emigrate. They will sell their piece of land, if they are lucky to a family member, if not, to a distant villager and move out to another area, but the same sort of story repeats.