Fighting poverty one step at a time

from Hernando Today

By JOHN HERBERT Special to Hernando Today

A college freshman from Spring Hill wants to eliminate poverty in Africa and the rest of the world, one efficient step at a time. That’s fine by the United Nations, whose goal is to halve global poverty by 2015.

Unlike many do-gooders who just throw money at a problem and hope it will go away, 18-year-old Steve White would prefer to give poor Africans clean water wells, school books and teaching aids that might help them to sort out an issue at its origin. “We can show them how to spend their money better,” Steve reasons.

A recent graduate of Hernando County’s Central High School, Steve is currently settling in for his first year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on both scholarships and financial aid.

Ever the thinker, Steve points out that MIT collects $150 million a year in tuition, and then hands out $80 million in financial aid. “Why don’t they just lower the tuition?” he wonders.

In a prelude to his college studies, the redheaded teenager spent a week in Ghana in West Africa this summer to witness first-hand the application of humanitarian aid programs.

He traveled to Ghana with eight other students and teachers, under the auspices of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), to see the impact of the charity’s foreign help initiatives in action. “Too many village women carrying buckets of river water on their heads. That’s time-consuming, and it’s not clean water,” he reports.

Active in 98 countries, CRS was one of the first aid organizations to reach out to victims of the powerful earthquake that devastated southern Peru recently.

“There’s plenty of aid money pouring into Ghana and other developing countries,” Steve, the youngest of three brothers, reports. “The challenge is to put that money to work. Everyone wants to help, but they’re not sure how to.”

Steve intends to put his interest in economics and math to use striving to eliminate African poverty. Originally intending to study computer technology at MIT, he will concentrate on economics and distribution, instead. MIT collects field statistics, too, in its “Poverty Action Lab,” an added attraction for someone intent on combating world poverty.

“Plans to wipe out polio and other communicable diseases through immunization may be well-financed,” he admits. “But there aren’t enough doctors in places like Ghana to prescribe the medicines. This is a real problem.”

In Ghana, Steve became aware of the “brain drain” of doctors and nurses to better-paying positions in the West. “Many villages still lack hospitals or clinics that could offer medical personnel an inducement to stay put. The trick will be not to spend more money, but to treat a disease,” he says.

Well-spoken, Steve won his spot on the Ghana trip by selling the most chocolate bars at his school. Not just the most, but at maximum profit.

Buying the bars wholesale at 85 cents each, he was advised to retail them at a dollar apiece. “Wait a minute,” it dawned on him, “I can sell them for more.”

Applying his economics, Steve reasoned he could push the candy bars successfully at $1.50 each instead, maybe losing a few sales but netting more overall for Ghana’s farmers. He actually met some of those very same farmers who grew the cocoa beans that were turned into the chocolate he sold.

Steve reckons his direct candy-bar contribution was a more efficient way to support Ghana’s economy than U.S. taxpayer-supported foreign aid, which is in the process of relocating to even needier countries anyway.

He was also impressed by African children’s hunger for more education.

“Their classrooms may have dirt floors, but the pupils stay put and study hard all day. That’s a good thing. People there don’t just sit and mope about their problems. They work a lot harder, too.”

Ghana’s students don’t have any electricity or TV to pull them home, either. “If they fall behind, we can give them better supervision with donated teaching aids and books, not just cash,” Steve noted and added, “There’s also the incentive of two square meals a day at school. They do much better in school with a little nutrition.

In the long term, Steve believes there’s hope to abolishing poverty by giving “microcredits,” a small-loan concept that earned a Bangladeshi banker a Nobel Prize last year.

“Microcredits” means loaning seemingly token amounts to hopeful trades people. One frequently-cited example is of handing out $25 to buy a sewing machine that will keep a village seamstress or shoemaker a gainfully-employed taxpayer for years to come.

“The small loans are a life-changing form of assistance for people living in poverty,” says Steve. “They help buy livestock, start a small business or even launch a tourism project.

Does all this mean we will find Steve immersed in some poor African village in the future? Not very likely. “I can see myself volunteering right after college, but I don’t really like to travel and it takes forever,” he admits. Florida-Ghana, via Amsterdam, took him 20 hours each way.

Instead, Steve plans “to stay home, crunch the numbers and set policies.”

With good reason, he thinks. “If the poor start to understand and are well-fed, there’s less of a chance they’ll become terrorists. They might up wind up feeling we’re nice enough people to leave alone.”

Herbert writes regularly for Hernando Today. He can be contacted at jah38@juno.com.