Poor Countries

We are for it : We think rich countries should help poorer countries. First of all, we can help them for humanitarian reasons. In Fact, the harsh realities of some countries affected us and our duty is to help those who are not as lucky as we are. For instance, one out of seven people do not have access to clean water for drinking, cooking or washing… Whereas we, we tend to waste the water. What’s more, we have the chance to live in a rich country where we can be treated fairly. Secondly, we can help poorer countries for political reasons because it’s a way to control and influence these countries. In Fact, in this way, they depend on us. So, our country stretches its influence in the world, as is the case of the USA. And it makes our country worthwhile. Finally, we can help the poorer countries for economic reasons. It’s a good way to import or export goods more easily. For example they can import products which are rare in our country. This facilitates the exchanges between countries and above all this consolidates our economy. Ultimately, helping poorer countries consolidates rich countries, like France, by helping to develop poorer nations.

We are for it !
First because rich countries, like the USA, can give money to poor countries, and it’s more intelligent than spend it for receptions. In fact this money can be used to build shools or hospitals: That way fewer people will be ill or illiterate, and the building of schools will lead to the development of countries and thanks to the children’s education, jobs will be created. Furthermore, by helping poor countries, rich countries show solidarity and they make needy people’s dreams come true because their living conditions improve . All these consequences will make the world a better place, full of equality and fraternity. Finally, we should not forget that we are really lucky to be born in the good side of the world. In fact, if we were Africans, we would like people to help us. In conclusion, we think that rich countries should help poorer countries.

We are for helping poor countries.
First of all, it’s unfair that rich people should live in decent conditions whereas poorer ones are needy. Indeed, they didn’t choose to be given birth in a poor country and they can’t go away. A further reason is that we can’t live as if nothing bad happened in the world. It’s our duty to help them. Don’t the government’s feel guilty to exploit resources and populations of poor countries ? Then, rich countries should stop sending money to governments as they send cards : Send it to poor families instead because in most cases governments keep money to buy weapons. Moreover, if there were fewer weapons and fewer needy people, there would be fewer wars and conflicts. Now we will let you think about it !

I agree with this, an economic and material help can be useful to the poor countries which are victims of the famine and sickness but It’s a short-term solution. In fact, the rich countries should help the poorer countries but it’s an utopian idea to imagine our money never will be affected by political corruptions. Moreover, It’s a paradoxical action to help them because the economic and political system impoverish these nations. I think the best solution is to change the exchange beetwen wealthy and needy countries, we can’t continue to live in this system when so many people die because we have created inequalities. Actually, a lot of people answer yes to this poll but they will never do anything especially to solve the problems except listening to Bono speeches and music. It’s simply to have a clear conscience.

Of course wealthy countries should offer aid to poorer ones. In most cases, the countries that are now wealthy, through their colonial empires, played a part in messing up developing countries in the first place, drawing artificial border lines, for example, which did not correspond with the natural contours of areas controlled by different groups within the countries. This often means that the countries are now plagued interminably by civil wars as various factions vie for control of the unnatural nation state.

Ultimately, it’s in our own self-interest to help poorer countries. If we can help kick-start their economies, they will in the end provide markets for our products and their people will stop trying to illegally emigrate to the West in search of a better life.

I believe that the richer countries should help the poorer countries. However, the richer countries have to be able to help themselves before they can help others. There are people who suffer in the richer countries and they should be taken care of first. Once richer countries are able to successfully help themselves, then they can go help the poorer countries. However, I believe that it is wrong for the poorer countries to fully depend on the richer countries. Because one helps the other does not mean that they are obligated to support them forever. Richer countries need to help poorer countries to help themselves.

It is a philanthropic right to help others. It is not required by anything. We as people, I think, should do this as a means to our own happiness. I am glad when I give and know that a young kid or even adult will be somehow better off by my gift. That is what we as humans should do, but are not required to do.

Governments should never ‘aid’ foreign countries. This has never worked in the past and it will never work. (You never said governments in the title and that is why I was for providing aid. Sorry if I misinterpreted.) Countries that provide aid only do so by taking from its citizens. There is not always justice in equality; there is always justice in treating people equally. Aid to other countries from ‘rich’ countries is just another form of socialism.

NOToday, we agree with the fact that there is poverty all around the world, and inequalities are getting bigger and bigger, but we think that nowadays, the conditions do not enable us to help poor countries. Because of the economic crisis, our purchase power is decreasing. Let’s imagine, just for a second, that we are giving money to Africa now. What would our donation represent during a crisis? Nothing compared to a donation when the storm is over. However wanting to help does not always mean that we have to give money right now! We should think about solutions which are going to help poor countries to be self-sufficient and not to make them just more dependent on us. So, instead of giving money dumbly (money might be embezzled), we should think about a way to help those countries to stand on their own feet. Ultimately, we also have a lot of poverty and people in need in our country so we should help our own fellowmen before helping the others. To put it in a nutshell, we are not helping poor countries, but we are against giving money now because of the crisis and against giving money just to clear our guilty conscience, because that would just make them more dependent.

Today, the world is becoming more and more closely linked. Trade has increased and the movement of people between countries is greater than ever before. However, billions of people still live in poverty, and in many places, the gap between rich and poor are widening. This essay will look at the arguments for and against helping poor countries.

There are many reasons for helping poor countries. First of all, there are humanitarian reasons. Like individuals who give to charity, many countries feel it is their religious, social, or moral duty to help people in other countries who are suffering from food crisis, drought, war, or disease. However, many rich countries also donate money for political or diplomatic reasons. They want to maintain a relationship of dependency with the recipient, or simply to influence the government and direction of the country. A further reason why many countries help poorer ones is for economic reasons. The donors may want to control the supply of commodities such as oil, water, or wheat. Alternatively, the richer country may want to ensure markets for their own products, whether it’s computers or shoes.

However, aid is not necessarily the best way to help a country. For one thing, billions of dollars of aid often goes missing, into corrupt governments or inefficient administration. A second point is that many foreign aid projects are unsuitable for the target country. Many agencies build huge dams or industrial projects that fail after a few years or that do not involve the local people. Furthermore, much aid returns to the donor. This can be in the form of expensive specialized equipment and experts from the donor country.

There are many other ways we can help poor countries. Opening up trade barriers, so that poor countries can sell their goods is one way. Another is to remove subsidies so that imported goods from poorer countries can compete fairly. A third method is to forgive debts. Many poor countries have huge interest repayments on old loans. The needs of the poorer countries may seem obvious. However, although our humanity makes us want to help eliminate poverty and suffering, we must examine the real needs of poor countries and implement solutions that will benefit both them and us.

Today’s world has been divided into developing and industrialised countries which the main difference between them is the amount of money that governments apply in important sectors such as education, health and commerce. Most of the poorer nations are buried in debts as a result of their unbalanced finances which are reflect in a failed health care, an unstructured education system and a weak international trade. This vicious cycle will continue indefinitely unless wealthier nations show interest in minimizing the worldwide economic differences, as well as taking more responsibility for assisting less fortunate countries. Most of the African countries live in sub-human conditions because of the extreme poverty, upheaval, hunger, disease, unemployment, lack of education and both inexperienced and corrupt administrations.

The devastating consequences of the AIDS epidemic in those countries could improve if the infected population were to receive free drugs to control the disease, have access to health professionals and get information on how to prevent its spread. But this can only be achieved through international help programs in which leaders of the world’s richest countries donate medicine and also send doctors and nurses to treat and educate those in need. Moreover, most of the poor countries rely on selling agricultural products and raw materials to rich nations and buying industrialized products from them resulting in a huge financial deficit. Consequently, they borrow a significant amount of money from the World Bank to try to improve their broken economies, but sometimes the money disappears with no significant changes and they cannot even pay the interest to the bank. Regarding this issue, last year the G8, which is comprised of leaders of the eight richest nations, decided to forgive billions of dollars worth of debt owed by the world’s poorest nations.

In addition, they developed adequate loan programs to financially assist those countries. In conclusion, leaders of the industrialised countries play an indispensable role in assisting developing nations in dealing with essential areas such as health, education and trade. Also, their aid is the key to breaking the vicious cycle, which results in poverty and death. The world’s rich countries need to embark on a huge transfer of funds to developing countries in order for both groups to grow richer and reduce their carbon emissions significantly, a United Nations report urges today. Delaying spending on mitigating climate change in the developing world “runs the real danger of locking in dirtier investments for several more decades”, says the annual survey from the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA). Ahead of this weekend’s meeting of G20 finance ministers in London, the report estimates that developed countries need immediately to transfer around 1% of world gross product (WGP), or $500-600bn (£300-370bn), to poor countries.

Carrying on with business as usual, or making only minor changes, could lose 20% of WGP so doing nothing would be an expensive mistake, it argues. UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon says the report “makes the case for meeting both the climate challenge and the development challenge by recognising the links between the two and proceeding along low-emissions, high-growth pathways”. The report adds, using unusually strong language, that “by any measure, the amounts currently promised for meeting the climate challenge in the near term are woefully inadequate”. It continues: “The failure of wealthy countries to honour long-standing commitments of international support for poverty reduction and adequate transfers of resources and technology remains the single biggest obstacle to meeting the climate change challenge.” The survey estimates that about $21bn (£13bn) in official development funding is set aside to addressing climate change, mostly for fighting problems such as drought or flooding.

The total amount of climate financing that is required is a large multiple of that figure, it says. “If the international community is serious about a ‘global new deal’, it should be just as serious about committing resources on the same scale as was needed to tackle the financial crisis and defeat political extremism.” The report challenges the thinking that the climate problem can simply be addressed by across-the-board emission cuts by all countries or by relying exclusively on market-based solutions to generate the required investments. Its central point is that developing countries can only make a meaningful contribution tocombating climate change if their economies continue to grow strongly. In turn that would require satisfying the growing energy needs of developing countries, which are projected to double that of the developed world over the coming decades. “This raises the question for climate change negotiators of how poor countries can pursue low-emissions, high-growth development,” it says, with an eye on the Copenhagen climate change conference in December.

The report argues that the technologies that would allow developing countries to switch to a sustainable development path do exist. These include low-energy buildings, new drought-resistant crop strains and more advanced primary renewables. But they are often prohibitively expensive and, the report says, such a transformation would require “a level of international support and solidarity rarely mustered outside a wartime setting”. Poor countries, the report says, are facing “vastly more daunting challenges than those confronting developed countries and in a far more constrained environment”. Economic growth remains a priority for them, not only to reduce poverty but also to bring about a gradual narrowing of the huge income differentials with wealthy countries.

“The idea of freezing the current level of global inequality over the next half century or more (as the world goes about trying to solve the climate problem) is economically, politically and ethically unacceptable,” the report says. The study’s authors believe that they could be pushing on a door that is starting to open with world policymakers becoming increasingly aware of the dangers posed by rapid climate change. Professor Nicholas Stern, who carried out a seminal study into the economics of climate change three years ago, recently published a bookarguing for speedier action on a bigger scale than before.

Proponents think that rich countries should help the poor countries because loaning money to developing countries aids can helping them improvement the situation from poverty and disease. Opponents, think that the money doesn’t go for the place where they needs and the debt is a lot of pressure for the poor countries. In my opinion, that rich countries should help the poor countries. The responsibility of richer countries help the poor countries should more than they did it before, it can be throught in health, education,economy and policy.

One of the strongest reason for people who against the rich countries should help the poor countries is the aid doesn’t work. Foreign aid usually considered too much for poor countries, or useless on inability governments. Africa has received over US$1 trillion in international aid over the past 50 years, intended for health care, education, infrastructure and agriculture, among other things. “Between 1970 and 1995 aid to Africa increased rapidly and aid dependency (measured as the aid-to-GDP ratio) stood at nearly 20% in the early 1990s. Measured differently, the mean value of aid as a share of government expenditures in African countries was well above 50% between 1975 and 1995” (Why Aid Doesn’t Work). “The total amount of international development aid is now more than $100 billion a year to Africa. In 2008, rich countries gave $119.8 billion in foreign aid. This is over 10% more than in 2007 and is the highest amount ever given” (Statistics on International Development Aid). In the same period, the per capita GDP growth in Africa to reduce, for many years has been negative. Unfortunately, although good intentions from donor countries, the aid work has been useless in against poverty and promote the economic continued growth.

“Oh my God look at this rich countries just sitting there and watching the poor countries suffer.”Don’t you think that this rich countries should wake up and start doing something to help these poor countries such as Haiti due to the Earthquake it went through and also many other countries. One reason rich countries should help these poor countries is because if you take Haiti for example after the earthquake they had in 2010 there were many damages done to people and land because Many buildings were destroyed, roads and docks. Which made it very difficult to get aid to the people who were in need.Also damage was done to food, the poor people needed clean drinking water, clothes, cooking utensils, temporally shelters that they could at least live in for a certain time and mostly drugs and medicines. Without those poor people having clean drinking water to drink and dead bodies rotting in the hot sun the risk of life threatening diseases was expected.

The other major problem people were having was trying to re-build their houses and also their businesses but without money they could not do anything to recover what had been damaged in that earthquake.Also a lot of hospitals were destroyed and the hospitals were full of people which is why many people had to die on streets in front of everyone. Another reason why rich countries should help poor countries is because if you take Zimbabwe for example most of the families in Zimbabwe can’t even afford all three meals in a day and many women and children are starving to death and also many people are lacking food, clothing, shelter, health, and education and they also don’t have much water. One other reason why rich countries should help poor countries is because for example lets take Somalia people are unable to meet basic food requirements. Famine and disease have spread so much that it’s cause about one million deaths.Also due to the roads damage people can’t get assistance when in need it makes it ver

The awful toll of poverty across the world should make the strongest possible claim on the conscience of the rich West, citizens and governments alike. But the numbers are so huge, they are paralyzing. Over a billion people, more than three times the population of the United States, live in extreme poverty. What is “extreme poverty”? It is the kind of poverty that no American, however poor, ever experiences. It means that you barely have the means to stay alive, even when times are good. If times are not good and you become ill, or have to cope with a drought or a bad harvest, you are quite likely to die. In sub-Saharan Africa today, an infant’s chance of surviving to the age of 65 is roughly one in three. If wealthy countries could do something to attack this scourge, the moral case for action would be irresistible. But can they? The record of foreign aid in advancing economic development and reducing poverty in the poorest countries has been weak. Since the 1960s, billions of dollars have been spent to no purpose.

As a result, in many Western capitals, aid fatigue set in long ago. Rich-country donors still talk a good fight and go through the motions, but with no great conviction—and in most cases, their spending on aid is miserly. This week, the United Nations published a report, “Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals,” which is intended, among other things, to rekindle enthusiasm for development aid and to persuade the rich countries to spend far more on it. This document might actually have some effect. If it does, this will partly be because the U.N. chose Jeffrey Sachs to lead the team that produced it. Sachs, a professor at Columbia University, is a distinguished economist, an adviser to numerous poor countries, and a globally recognized authority on development. He is also a man of limitless energy and awesome self-belief. It is not often that the U.N. publishes a document that so stirs the passions, and that puts such moral pressure on whoever reads it to demand action of their governments. In doing both, this new report may change the terms of the debate about development. As a piece of advocacy, therefore, it could well succeed.

But is its analysis true—or is the report, assuming that it does succeed in spurring action, the prelude to another surge of meaningless aid yielding no results? Sachs and his team squarely confront the idea that aid has failed in the past. This conventional wisdom, they argue, is a myth. First, the team says, studies that naively try to correlate aid with economic growth are misleading. A lot of aid is sent to countries that are in distress following natural disasters—such as the Indian Ocean tsunami—or in response to other humanitarian emergencies. Countries facing such crises will typically suffer setbacks to economic growth at the same time. For this reason, aid will be speciously correlated with low growth; this does not mean that aid does not work. When you separate humanitarian relief from the rest, and look to see whether development aid promotes growth, the results are better.

Also, Sachs and his team argue, a great deal of past aid has been badly designed. Different donors have pursued different aid strategies, and have failed to coordinate with one another. Aid commitments have been short-term, making it difficult to meet the recurrent costs of longer-term development projects. Specific development needs vary a lot from country to country, the report argues, something that donors have tended to ignore. Design the aid well, say Sachs and his team, and the results will be good—provided that one other crucial condition is met. Aid works well only in countries that are reasonably well governed. This is one of the clearest findings from recent research on development. Corruption, official incompetence, and the failure to protect basic property rights are capable of rendering aid not just useless but harmful, as when it enriches corrupt leaderships and strengthens their hold on power.

This poses quite a problem for advocates of aid, especially of aid for the poorest countries, because those countries are typically badly governed. It is a dilemma: The countries that need aid most are often the ones most likely to waste it; the ones that can best use it need it less, if at all. The report agrees that reasonably good government is vital for certain kinds of aid to work, but it says that some of the poorest countries do in fact meet the governance test. These countries—which in Africa would include Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda, and which might number at least a dozen worldwide—should be fast-tracked for much more aid, it says. And the report is full of suggestions about how the money should be spent. The results, it says, would be impressive. Once aid was seen to work, support for it in the West would increase. Governments might even be willing to keep the promise they have been making for 35 years to give 0.7 percent of their national income each year in aid. (Most fall far short; America gives around 0.2 percent.)

And the “tough-love” approach of being far more generous to well-run countries would encourage competition among other poor countries to improve their standards of governance. It all sounds fine, but does it really add up? Some of it does, but there are problems. The emphasis on good government as a precondition is welcome and, so far as the U.N. is concerned, something of a departure. But the report itself flinches somewhat from the implications of this point—and, in practice, the U.N. would do so even more violently. The report blurs the line between very poor countries capable of using aid well and very poor countries capable only of wasting it. For instance, it apologizes for bad governance in most of sub-Saharan Africa by saying that many African countries are in fact pretty well governed, allowing for their level of income. So what? The thing that matters is not whether countries are well run in any relative sense, but whether they are sufficiently well run to use aid well. This notion of “relatively well governed” is an evasion.

In the same vein, the report also talks of countries that are “potentially well governed”—countries, it says, with governments that have the will to rule well but not the means; countries that would be well governed given a bit of help from outside. Again, this seems a very dubious concept. Certainly, using aid to improve governance would be a fine idea if it worked. But this has been tried many times with notably little success. Meanwhile, “potentially well governed” just is not good enough. Even letting that go, the report’s list of “potentially well-governed” countries is perplexing. It includes five of the seven most corrupt countries in the world, as judged by Transparency International (a nongovernmental organization that ranks countries for this purpose): Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Chad, Nigeria, and Paraguay. The report does not regard the other two—Haiti and Myanmar—as potentially well governed, but the report calls for aid for Haiti in any case, because of its special “conflict” needs.

Evidently then, the report’s insistence on good government is not as rigorous as it seems at first sight. In its zeal to produce detailed, practical aid programs, the report has gone way overboard, it seems to me, in favoring top-down development “strategies” that would place crippling administrative burdens on donors and recipient governments alike, and that are probably undesirable in any case. Sachs is convinced—and in this, he is doubtless well intentioned and sincere—that following his recommendations in full would allow the targets known as the Millennium Development Goals to be reached by 2015. Achieving these goals would mean, among other things, halving extreme poverty worldwide. Given the fact that sub-Saharan Africa is currently making no progress at all toward such a target, the report seems wildly optimistic about what might be achieved. Perhaps the aim is to inspire. But there is a danger in that—namely, a renewed cycle of exaggerated hopes and subsequent disappointment.

The best things in the report deserve nonetheless to be recognized and acted upon. Identify a group of reasonably well-governed yet very poor countries, such as those already mentioned, and gear up to deliver a lot more aid in a sustained and predictable way. Favor projects that place the fewest demands on the local political and administrative infrastructure, such as providing free anti-malarial bednets. (The report suggests a variety of straightforward actions of this sort, which it calls “quick wins.”) Very poor countries that are capable of growing faster should not be held back for lack of aid. At the moment, some are, and that is wrong. Unfortunately, however, those countries are not as numerous as the U.N. wants to believe. We should be happy to engage with trenchant criticisms of aid – it is important to do so if those of us involved in the development sector are to retain credibility in the long-term. Aid has mixed impacts, can harm as well as help development and takes the focus away from other more important things rich countries should be doing to spur development.

African governments should set out medium-term plans to reduce aid dependency, while rich countries need to switch from traditional forms of aid-giving to supporting global goods (like clean energy, vaccinations, security) in new ways. But there is one argument against aid that we need to tackle head on; the idea that we cannot afford aid, that we are being over-generous, especially in a time of cuts at home. This notion that we are being too generous is an attack not on aid, but on the development project itself, by which I mean the idea that people in rich countries have a duty to stand in solidarity with people in poorer countries who face hardships and injustice, often caused or compounded by the actions and decisions of rich countries themselves. Using pejorative terms like “handouts” and “doling out”, some parts of the media are mounting a campaign to suggest Britain should beembarrassed by our level of aid giving. But the idea that aid is generous is absurd. Some people, inspired by religious tradition, think it is appropriate to give 10% of what they have to charity, £10 in every £100 of earnings.

In 2010, the UK gave not £10, not £1, but 56p ($0.91) in overseas aid for every £100 ($163) we earned as a country. On average, since 1990, we have given even less, 35p ($0.57). If we add in personal contributions to charities (ie aid that doesn’t come through the government), as the Spectator (UK magazine) argues quite convincingly that we should, 2010 saw 80p ($1.30) in every £100 given to poorer countries. If I gave 80p in every £100 I earned to help people less fortunate than me, who would call me generous? I don’t think many people in this country have that attitude. I am quite embarrassed that newspapers in my country think this level of giving is generous. What would make them happy – 40p ($0.65) in every £100 or 30p ($0.49)? How stingy do we have to be before their bizarre anti-solidarity is satisfied? But the main point is that giving aid is not actually a great act of generosity. Aid buys things donors want (such as political support and economic advantage, whether directly for donor businesses or indirectly through policy change).

The other things rich countries need to do to really show solidarity with the poor will require if not more generosity (as we can turn them to our economic advantage) then certainly greater risk: accept fairer trade rules, adapt rapidly to climate change and resource scarcity by limiting our consumption, accept the employment consequences of a more just arms trade, clamp down on tax havens and force our international companies to abide by social, environmental and accounting norms (to name a few). Being truly generous requires rich countries to undergo fairly profound changes in the way they have lived for the last few decades. The notion that giving away our loose change is embarrassingly generous would be an odd one to poor people around the world trying to scrape together a living under the unfair system rich countries have established to work in their favour. It is certainly true that poor people in the UK and other rich countries are going through tough times, as services are cut and jobs are hard to find. The kind of cuts being made in the UK at the moment are both economically illiterate and ethically unacceptable.

I watched a BBC documentary called Poor Kids last week showing the lives of three of the 3.5 million very poor children in the UK. It was shocking. The UK has created a hugely unequal society in which bankers go home with millions while one London council has started to charge children to visit playgrounds. It will take a long time to carry out the radical reform needed to bring it to something verging on sanity and fairness. But these problems existed long before the financial crisis. To suggest that we should seek to help the poorest at home by withdrawing support from people abroad who are much poorer, while the rich make off with their millions, is surely morally indefensible in any philosophy. Some argue that countries we are giving money to are doing better than us.

Well, some poor countries are certainly growing faster than us, which is as it should be – they are catching up to our standard of living. But take India’s annual income and divide it between the whole population and each Indian gets just over $3 per day. Better than it was, yes, but still hardly above starvation wages, and nowhere near the UK’s $113 per day ($41,370 per year). Despite two years of financial turmoil, the UK is still the sixth richest country in the world. Getting the facts and ethics straight on this issue is crucial not to defend aid, but to defend the very concept of generosity in a changing world. Rich countries need to be more generous not less and, as Andrew Mitchell rightly says, they should be proud when they stand in solidarity with the worse off.