As European organizations unilaterally set the international "a-dollar-a-day" benchmark that statistically establishes Africa's average poverty levels, it is impossible for that methodology to fully capture the scale of randomness, informality and communal strife that contributes to the African existence. And while a person will need to own certain assets, lifestyle, and amount of money to be considered rich and prosperous in the US, one might only need a fraction of that in Africa to be affluent and pleasantly satisfied with his/her life. Happiness costs less here. And though Africans might not get richer faster because wealth is shared as it covers extended responsibilities, loneliness is the price for maximizing ones gain and personal comfort in an individualist European society that also has social security, minimum wage, higher salaries, housing benefits, and several other state benefits that aren't to be found in Africa anytime soon. And with that in mind, let us know who is providing us with the current definition of poverty. It is basically what the West says we lack, or need to have in order to be considered prosperous. To my knowledge, it doesn't consider what anyone is satisfied with. Is insatiability quietly seen as an important impetus for economic growth that it it is silently left out of the equation? Maybe. Did the poverty scale include other world peoples ideas on how we best exist? The fact is that the idea of prosperity seems to establish Europe and US as the de-facto model societies that the rest must emulate...and possibly buy from. Rural Africans for example will then abandon their ancestral grass-thatched roof made at almost no cost from abundant nature. They now also need cash for tapped water, electricity, and a light bulb. They are then deemed poor if they don't have these basics. And by then they are in an economic system that they aren't fully consenting to, or cognisant of. Do Africans who don't know modernity consider themselves poor? Or can anyone claim that such peoples are empoverished? Surely not. Because the terminology is based on ones adoption of Western standards as the benchmark for quality of life. So comparably, and with the insatiability element attached to economic growth, Europeans are therefore far superior in greed for wealth, material possessions and power/influence than Africa could ever be. History, neo-colonialism, and continued economic plunder seem to support this notion. But how then can the idea of poverty be the same under both the African and Western circumstances? Africa might possibly also require a fresh translation of its own values into a new statistical ratio that encompasses what prosperity is in absolute terms but from the continents socio-economic stand points. The lesser the disconnect with our specific realities, the easier it is to pinpoint and subsequently address our various true challenges.
By Hussein Lumumba Amin 29/04/2016
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