Saturday, May 23, 2015

Poverty Reduction

Poverty Crisis is one of the utmost critical subject of discussion in today’s economic world and severely impacting most of the African and several Asian nations. Being a national of one of the countries it has always been a grave concern for me to have a deep dive analytical and statistical analysis, find out the contributing factors (internal, external, direct, indirect), engaging the local and international authorities in all of the relevant fields to eradicate this evil through the implementation of right policies and governance of international standards as defined by respective authorities.
Based on my keen observation locally, I have learnt the following:

Defining Poverty:
A person or group of personnel having shortage of materials or money in comparison to a defined criteria. The poverty can be a temporary situation or chronic problem depending upon the situation and circumstances of the family. The personnel can be permanently falling below the poverty line and the situation may get deteriorated more and more if certain amount of attention is not given. This miserable situation may lead to several social, economic, biological problems and may result in high crime rates, high penetration of diseases, social imbalance. Hence it is extremely important for us to control this situation.  Another terrible angle to this situation is that due to unfair and unbalanced law and order, professional services, and other lose skeleton of a country’s overall system, the number of people under poverty line keep increasing gradually which means the cancer of poverty strengthens its roots more and more.

Factors influencing Poverty:
·         Lack of security
·         Inequality between different races and religions
·         Inequality of genders
·         Unavailability of equal opportunities
·         Unavailability of jobs and infrastructure

Impacted Domains
·         Health – Millions of deaths due to high cost of health services or unavailability of health services in poverty impacted areas.
·         Education – Millions of children unable to go to school due to unavailabity of schools or high cost of education.
·         Hunger – Millions of deaths due to hunger because of low income.
·         Crimes – steep rise in crime rates due to embarrassment of the poverty impacted people or considering short cuts to earning money by means of crimes.

Measures to for eradication:
If we consider Poverty Management as a Real Life Project then we can apply the Six Sigma DMAIC concept which says: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control
Having said that it would be extremely interesting to join this course to draw the baseline of the definition, defining criterian to measure the poverity in different domains of life, performing stasticial evaluation and trend analysis, and then taking corrective measures for each of the contributing factors and finally ensure the preventive methodologies not only to control its further penetration but also to reduce it. These measures include but not limited to installing more water wells, teaching farmers to produce more plants, teaching people new ways to be self-sufficient instead of becoming paracites, providing shelters, building schools and infrastructure, ensuring better health service and so on.

Final Note:
Its extremely stimulating for us to learn about it, equip ourselves with the advanced skills, engaging the relevant high chairs not only to draw the attention towards poverty but also taking necessary measures in all walks of life and adding value consistently by spreading the noble message and contribute not only at individual but encourage others for the same, again and again.

By Junaid Tahir