A Poverty Eradication Action Agenda

Poverty is created and maintained by structures and processes of injustices at local, national and global level. Inequitable access to productive resources, interlocked and distorted market operation, oppression and discrimination of women by values and systems of patriarchy, unsustainable patterns of production and consumption leading to huge environmental degradation, lack of good governance, excessively high military expenditure and natural or manmade disasters are the major factors at the local and national level that are responsible for the creation and recreation of poverty. Misfortunes and vulnerabilities of the poor increase manifold when global processes of injustice combine with local and national factors. Through such global processes such as the creation of the debt burden, excessive currency speculation, unfair trade and structural adjustment programmes, the chaining of the poor is complete. Poverty eradication is therefore, nothing but unshackling the poor of these chains.

All the UN Summits and conferences in the last decade have recognised in a way the local, national and global factors responsible for poverty and garnered global consensus and commitment. The United Nations Millennium Declaration serves both as a useful synthesis and summary of all the summits and conferences of the UN and provides a well-articulated agenda for action. The Declaration also provides the necessary global political commitment to build an antipoverty campaign. The Financing for Development and Commission on Social Development meetings can be seen as part of the implementation process of the campaign.
An antipoverty campaign will get a further boost and will be more politically binding if there was an anti-poverty pact signed between developed and developing countries. In such a pact, the developing countries would be obligated to take strong measures against the factors at local and national level that create poverty. On the other hand, the developed countries would be obligated to take strong decisive measures to remove international factors responsible for the creation and recreation of poverty.

Under the pact the national governments of developing countries would be obliged to:

• Substantially enhance the access of the poor to productive resources like land, water, and credit.
  
• Reform national budgets, both process and content, to be more pro-poor. This will mean that there should be progressive lessening of indirect tax to the poor while progressive taxing should cover all taxable income of the well-to-do. Doubling of investments in health, education and employment creation programmes should be the core strategy. This strategy for the empowerment of the poor should aim to have at least 50% of the national budget by five years.
  
• Reduce military expenditure to below 5% of the total budget within five years.
  
• Fully ratify the Convention on Eliminating all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and have the required legislation passed for its full implementation within five years.
  

Develop decentralized and empowered local government systems. Developed countries will, under the antipoverty pact, do the following:

• Increase Official Development Assistance (ODA) to reach the benchmark of 0.7% of GNP by five years.
  
• Cancel all debts within three years. The Heavily Indebted Poorest Countries (HIPC) initiative is too slow, too limited and its criteria are not very useful. All illegitimate debt should be cancelled i.e. all loans incurred during military and despotic rulers and loans which displaced people and degraded environment should be cancelled.
  
• Allow imports from developing countries by removing all forms of tax and tariff barriers within five years.
  
• Stop all exports of military hardware immediately.
  
• Impose an international currency transaction tax nationally in an internationally coordinated manner.
  
• Do away with the Structural Adjustment Programme in its current form. Instead, have a newer form of structural adjustment, which has sound strategies to reduce enormous gaps between the rich and the poor, increase social expenditure, reduce military expenditure and other forms of waste and increase manifold resources for productive employment.

Qazi Faruque Ahmed

In the fall of 2000, members of the International Council on Social Welfare elected Qazi Faruque Ahmed as the new President of the organization.
Qazi Faruque Ahmed founded PROSHIKA in Bangladesh in 1976 and led it to become one of the largest and well-known NGOs in the world. PROSHIKA has facilitated a participatory development process through which about twelve million poor from two million families are endeavoring to overcome their poverty.

He is a development practitioner who is one of the pioneers of a people centered, environment friendly, gender sensitive and pro-poor development model. This alternative model has got worldwide acceptance as it is found most effective for reducing poverty and sustainable development.

In addition to his intensive grassroots mobilization work, Qazi Faruque Ahmed is a forthright and energetic campaigner for pro-poor, pro-women and pro-environment national and international policies. Towards these ends he mobilised the whole NGO sector of Bangladesh (which is perhaps the largest in the world) and built alliances with international and national civil society. He was three times elected chairperson of ADAB the apex body of NGOs in Bangladesh, which has a membership of eleven hundred NGOs.

He also participated actively in UN conferences such as UNCED in Rio, the Women’s Conference in Beijing and the World Summit for Social Development Conference in Copenhagen. He is also actively engaged in the follow-up to these conferences. Nationally, he had served in the last five years on a number of national committees on education, child welfare, local government, environment, housing, land distribution, water resource and forestry and brought about significant policy changes to favour the poor and women.

In recognition of his achievement he has been awarded ‘Doctor of Laws’ from the University of Bath in the UK for making significant contributions to the economic development of Bangladesh. He has also been awarded the Jhanara Imam award for his promotion of secular ideology; Bangabandhu (Sheikh Mujibar Rahman: father of the nation) Award for social service; Human Rights Gold Medal for social development awarded by National Human-Rights Journalists’ Association; Aswini Trophy for serving vulnerable humanity and society and the Begum Rokeya Award for Socio-economic development of Bangladesh.