Where do your draw the (poverty) line?

If you've been following this blog for a while, you might know that Out For Equality started as my 'Take Action' project after participating in a World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts event back in 2010. That is why I'm particularly excited to be participating in Chat For Change - a human rights project set up by Erin Wicking in Australia after she too participated in a WAGGGS event. Chat For Change is all about speaking out for human rights, with a different focus subject each month, through blogs, videos and events. This month the subject is "Poverty" and this is my blog:

When I was 18, one of my first essays in the first few weeks of university asked me to define the poverty line - how do we decide who is poor and who is not? What about extreme poverty, absolute poverty, relative poverty? Is a $1 a day a useful measure? What about the poorest 10% of a population? Or those earning less than 50% of the median income in a country? The questions go on.

Looking back at this question after the intervening 6 years and I know from my experiences that the idea of a poverty line is only partially useful. A poverty line lets you decide where poverty is growing or receding, it's lets you make nice statistics and for bureaucrats to pat themselves on the back for making sure there's less 'poor' people in a given year for example. But it makes me uncomfortable because statistics can be manipulated, numbers can be twisted, and they don't tell you about the daily lived realities of the people either side of the line. Poverty doesn't effect "10%", it effects real people. 

That's why instead of focusing on the numbers, we should focus on the solutions - we should focus on enabling everybody to live a fulfilling life regardless of their economic means. 

Ending poverty is not about 'giving them more money' especially as, in the UK at least, the dominant discourse has a distinctly colonial flavour. White people give money to some more white people who make the decisions about how and where they will spend the money which will be eagerly received by black and brown people (largely in Africa and increasingly in Asia). 

I want to propose a different route to ending poverty. Whilst I think there are key projects that are necessarily for a fulfilling life such as education, healthcare, employment and being able to live free from violence, we need to co-commission any project with the community it will affect. By delivering poverty eradication strategies with local partners we enable people as creators of their own future, we will deliver more sustainable projects and we will deliver development which is relevant to that community, not to the small elite group of people who are funding or planning it. 

Relative poverty also isn't a concept we can ignore. This methodology would therefore be as appropriate to communities in the UK and Australia as anywhere else in the world - through the non-discriminatory provision of support and resources, we can enable everybody to become agents of development in their own communities.