Question

If you had $50 billion (or some other large sum of money) how would you spend it to help poor countries (from two different parts of the world, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, or Latin America).

Answer 1

The most important things to spend on in these poor countries are human development issues. The most pertinent problems in these countries and how to help inject money to solve them are as follows -

1. Poverty: One of the most important problems in the poor nations is the poverty rate. People here are in extreme poverty and barely have enough sustenance to survive even on a daily basis. To help combat these, strong infrastructure to mitigate poverty and targetted schemes should be put into place. The most important way to deal with this is to generate employment. Some urban and rural employment guarantee like the MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) that has been implemented in India, which gives a 100 days of paid employment to rural citizens can be implemented. It is also important to understand that poverty is not just a state of wealth and income but also a state of mind, and to prevent that certain other aspects of their lives also has to be changed, which are explained below.

2. Education: The most important impediment to eradication of poverty is the lack education which prevents children from the poor households from getting good permanent jobs and hence the cycle of poverty continues. If the funds are available, then these households should be enabled with free primary education up to the level that is required to get proper employment. This will greatly help reduce inter-generational poverty.

3. Health care: The condition of healthcare is precarious in most poor nations where privately porvided healthcare facilities are too costly for the lower income classes to avail. The situation of the government health care services is too bad and as a result, the poor families hardly have access to proper health care facilities and this futher impoverishes their condition. Hence, proper and cheap health care facilities should be made available for the poor households to enable them to lead healthier lives and hence have a better society for themselves.

4. Law and order: The crime rates of most poor countries is also very high. This is mostly because resources are so scarce in these nations that poeple have to fight to stay alive. It is also because of the very poor state of the law enforcement agencies in these nations. Hence, proper money should be spent on training and organisation of a proper police force and law enforcement agencies so that crime rates can be brought down and the poeple in these countries can lead improved lives.