THE AMBASSADORS
Special Peace Issue
FEATURES
THE AMBASSADORS
Special
Peace Issue
FEATURES
Volume 2, Issue 1
January 1999
Literacy’s role in the search for peace
Can the Poor Inherit the Earth
by Robin Arthur
Peace will elude the world for as long as poverty, social injustice, violence and crime, religious intolerance and civil strife baulk it. At the root of it all is a fundamental precondition to development that has played cat and mouse in the developing world, thus causing the imbalances in world social justice. Robin Arthur looks at literacy’s role in the search for peace.
If an arbitrary upper limit of $600 annual per capita income is set, the Third World embraces about 100 nations, comprises 60 per cent of the earth's surface and is the home of about 70 per cent of the human race, some 2.8 billion people. When looking at development failure, that statistic is not music to the ears. Civil strife, the refugee problem, repression by state authority, dictatorships, low life expectancy, inaccessibility to safe drinking water and critical mass migration are typical of Third World problems and point to the absence of a fundamental precondition to development. Notable is the fact that almost 1.3 billion people in the world are condemned to live in utter poverty. They include nearly all the 30,000 children who die every day from malnutrition, virtually all the one billion people who cannot read or write and almost all the 300 million children who do not go to school.
What has gone unnoticed in the West is that the developing world is torn between the burden of the past and the problems of the present. Prejudices, superstitions and bizarre social stigma have led to horrifying spectacles and have been restrictive to growth. The Indian spirit, for example, is half cultural and half religious in its overtones. Ritualism, rites and ceremonies take precedence over reason. Seen from that point of view, the Western approach to development is obviously not relevant. Besides, today's development models are frankly perverse. The structure of international commerce deprives developing countries of $500 billion or 10 times more than what they get in foreign aid. Debt repayments by poor countries have exceeded the amount of capital they receive from rich lender countries. The IMF and the World Bank appear to have spurred Asian nations to borrow more than the governments, per se, thought prudent. As a consequence, India, Indonesia and the Philippines are today's veteran borrowers and along with Burma, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are heavily dependent on official and concessional borrowing.
From India & Ethiopia to Bangladesh
India, for example, continues to borrow as much as $2 billion per year since the early Nineties, but its exports have shown no sign of growth as the IMF and the World Bank promised would be the result of import liberalisation. Furthermore, the Philippines has missed virtually all the economic targets that had been agreed between the debtor country and the IMF.
What is recognised by geographers is that the obvious deterrent to development is the Third World's alarming rate of population growth. It's no secret that the living standards are a good side better in the developing countries of the East where the governments are getting a hold on population accretion. China, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, Mayanmar, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Turkey, the greater part of Africa, many countries of the Middle East as well as Mexico and Panama, still record growth rates of two or three per cent. The fallout is inevitable.
Ethiopia's food crises, like those throughout Africa, have historically been blamed on drought. But drought does not always have to result in disaster. Population growth, appears to have a more fundamental link with famine. Drought may have triggered the famine of the mid-Eighties. But the fact that , while food production has fallen by two per cent a year since the Sixties and populations have continued to grow at anywhere between two and three per cent across most of Africa, is a matter of grave concern for the continent.
Dr. Wally N'Dow, the Secretary General of Habitat 2 (UNCHS) made a notable observation sometime ago in an early morning interview with me. He said that of the 100 babies being born every day, 80 are from the Third World. "If we do not give these children the skills to empower themselves, the burden of life will ultimately impact on all of humanity."
The "bitter half" is the other half of the problem. "Gobar ka kaam" (the Hindi equivalent for crap work) refers to the fuel cakes made from cow dung and which has been the woman's lot in India for hundreds of years. The woman's toil in India has gone largely unaccounted because much of it lies outside the organised sector. Sadly, although women account for half of the human race, they have been left out of the mainstream of economic life.
United Nations research, anyway, highlights a yawning gap betwen men and women in their treatment under law, in the workplace and in the political arena and this underpins the need to examine development aspects that ignore women. The opportunities for women versus men in Libya, Egypt, Sudan, and Pakistan account for a score of less than 10, whereas Brazil, Algeria, India and South East Asia do just a little better.
Furthermore, what some figures indicate is that it is precisely in the developing world that social injustice is almost ubiquitous, sexual abuse and torture of women go unchecked, female foetuses after ultrasonic scanning are aborted and that back-street abortions claim the life of one woman every three minutes, underlining a link between female illiteracy and gender-driven discrimination and social injustice. The recent incidents of branding women as witches in the tribal areas of the state of Bihar in India is, indeed, a sad commentary on Indian society as a whole.
Efforts by NGOs to address female illiteracy may have begun in pockets of India and Bangladesh. The declaration of International Women's Year and of the UN Decade for Women has served to stimulate interest in women's issues in Malaysia. In Africa, the Working Group on Female Circumcision has been able to bring together representatives from some 20 African countries to demystify the taboos which surround them. But while all this is some yeoman effort at addressing urgent issues in social injustice, these programmes stop short of attacking the ills from the root.
Gender-based Discrimination
At the heart of all gender-based discrimination, social injustice and deaths resulting out of problems linked to childbirth is the appallingly low literacy among women and the observation is corroborated by a UNICEF study which notes that nearly two out of every three illiterate people are women. It is no secret that demographers today are quick to point to the relation between fertility rates and female literacy.
Be that as it may, the economies of the developing world cannot be analysed in the light of classical theories and planned in terms of the conceptual apparatus of a Keynes or a Leontief. Far too much lies outside the organised sector and hence this never-ending search for a growth model applicable to conditions in the developing world. Since economic systems are about men or of state raising capital for men, it would seem natural to assume that the capitist seed germinates best in an entrepreneurial society and that progress can come only out of the creative over-abundance of those men whose ability produces more than their personal consumption requires. That is not a universal condition.
That is also precisely why India's skilled and educated middle class alone have been able to take a ride on its reform vehicle while the bulk of its poor, which anyway lies outside the organised sector, have been kept out of the development race. The opening up of markets, deregulation and introduction of an appropriate industrial policy need, as an integral part, an education policy that makes it possible to integrate the market into contemporary culture. Consequently, the chicken and egg question comes up: the question about whether it is prosperity that brings about change or social change that brings about prosperity is particularly relevant where low literacy has acted as a hindrance to progress.
At the other end of the spectrum, the low level of productivity per worker in industry in developing countries is largely a consequence of technological backwardness. It is often remarked that while India's annual exports are about $12 billion, the figure for much smaller nations such as Taiwan or Singapore is two or three times higher. What must not be ignored is that if industrialisation is, at all, making new forays across the East, it is because literacy levels in these states, now referred to as the Asian tigers, have been raised to about 90 per cent and skills are ubiquituously spread across their land masses.
It is subtle to look at the connection between the rate of literacy growth in the East and the rate of growth of their economies. In tandem, it is pertinent to look at the industry growth rates of nations in Africa, where literacy rates have been stunted for long. Sadly the undue obsession with industrialisation marks the malaise of the economic approaches to development in the Third World, where there is this overwhelming belief in the virtues of the Western approach to development in which progress is equated with urbanisation and industrial growth. The classical view assumes urbanisation and industrialisation as both the a priori condition and the ultimate objective of modernising development.
The Japanese System and the Third World
Japan's emergence as an economic juggernaut may have focused the attention of economists across the world. But those that have sought to emulate the Japanese system, have unfailingly concluded that among the key aspects of the Meiji Restoration period, the most important were the return of traditional Japanese political systems and the commitment to develop widespread education. All the while the interest in education which had manifested itself in the Tokugawa era, was given a fresh impetus in post-war Japan. There was a strong element of nationalistic indoctrination and an acceptance that education was to serve the needs of the state. These policies helped to shape the subsequent widespread development of Japanese education and the creation of a highly educated workforce which played a key role in Japan's remarkable economic resurgence. Taken together, the fundamental changes in the sphere of education abolished at a stroke the feudal social order.
If capitalism is no development recipe for the Third World, does self-empowerment at grassroot levels address the development paradox? China appears to have experimented with grassroot development excellently. In Chinese agriculture, the instrument of production is the People's Commune which is a large, essentially administrative and policy organisation and to which some 5,000 to 10,000 or in some cases, 30,000 to 40,000 rural folk are enrolled. That the Chinese have a genius for organisation seems to have been the revelation of an infinity of scholars. This capacity to enlist the energy of many for common purposes is everywhere in use.
At the other end, the Indian experiment with grassroot development provides a diagonally opposite perspective. Palyakrishnapuram, a village in Tamilnadu, which is part of a rural block of 85 villages called Kilvayattankuppam and is about as rural a region as there is in India, is a horror story, a microcosm of many isolated regions of rural India. The infant mortality rate is rampant, the local people suffer from respiratory diseases and the incidence of tuberculosis and measels is high. Children have been dying from diarrhoea and dehydration. The World Bank estimates that 80 per cent of India's 576,000 villages are without safe and clean water supply. The acute needs in the villages are so basic as drinking water, medical care and schools. With the exception of a much publicised dam or hydroelectric project, here and there, or some irrigation scheme, the governments have generally neglected rural economic development.
What this also underlines is that agricultural reform can do very little to change the economic paradigms. Despite yeoman efforts to deal with its chronic food problem, Africa, for example, has met with little success. Agricultural reform may bring about an equitable distribution of the wealth of resources. But for effective grassroot participation, the socio-cultural development of the rural sector, driven by higher literacy goals, must follow on the heels of agricultural reform, in order to prepare the climate in which the seed of economic development can germinate.
The UN Centre for Human Settlements(UNCHS)
These last many years have seen the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS) make worthy attempts to bring national governments and local communities together to work towards grassroot development. Rio de Janero, for example, shares many of the problems of the world's largest cities with squatter settlements and the rapid growth of the favelas only perpetuating poverty. In response to the problem, the Municipal Secretariat of Social Development (SMDS) is reported to have created an integrated program to reverse urban deforestation and designed a scheme that addressed drainage, sewage, reforestation and environmental education in the favelas. Indeed, the project, per se, is commendable. But it assumes long-term success only if current rates of population growth in Rio de Janero is halted.
In reality, the call for community participation across most countries of the Third World underlines a call for social change. But service delivery programs, anywhere, rely on widespread knowledge for their success. Groups of women are the service deliverers and educators in Combat VAW (Violence Against Women), a community-based approach to violence against women in Metro Manila. But the Philippines' literacy rate is currently high and its success cannot therefore automatically make it a model for other developing nations that do not share the same literacy rates.
Three residual observations must be made with reference to these development ititiatives: firstly, environment-driven projects may never be sustainable for as long as population accretion continues at current rates and over a time-frame neutralises any gains. Second, environement protection cannot take precedence over economic development, Lastly, cities ought firstly to be made socially equitable and politically participatory to prepare the climate in which the seed for ecologically sustainable development can germinate.
Conclusion
The agenda for the salvation of the world's marginalised societies ought to begin with the setting up of a Third World Education Funding Bank (TWEFB). The onus cannot be thrust upon Third World governments because a misplaced sense of national priorities, insufficient national resources and expertise, the lack of accountability, red tape and their like will continue to force their leaderships to shove the problem under the carpet. The TWEFB could perhaps come on stream under the auspices of the United Nations with governors drawn from a respective grouping of world leaders with rich countries contributing one per cent of national income towards its initial capital base. The additional cost of reaching the goal of basic education for a representative grouping of nations by the year 200 is estimated at about $5 billion, which could buy 25 Boeing 777s.
Robin Arthur is author of "CAN THE POOR INHERIT THE EARTH", a book that expounds Third World development perspectives, published by COMMACT, a registered Commonwealth Association of people and organisations involved in people-centered development.
