Poverty

The Make Poverty History campaign aims to narrow the gap between the rich and poor worldwide, using Fairtrade, aid, healthcare, and education, and urges richer countries to drop the debt owed to them by LEDCs.

You might want to visit their website, makepovertyhistory.org

Education is paramount in terms of eradicating poverty. To understand this, we must understand the cause of poverty. There are many causes of poverty, so I'm sorry to evade a short answer, but here I have made a list of some considerations:

• Overpopulation due to natural increase. The population of an LEDC (Less Economically Developed Country) in particular undergoes exponential population increase. There is little contraception, or religion forbids it; and the families primarily live on farms, and need work-hands, which means children (as children are cheaper than hired labour). There are many reasons why people have more children including culture. Education eradicates this by introducing ideas of family planning and realising the benefits of fewer children, like better healthcare, more food and less loss.
• Overpopulation due to immigration. Immigration may occur because of poor conditions in a neighbouring country, like war or natural disasters. Immigration cannot be avoided, but educating people in refugee camps helps them to have better hygiene, so disease is avoided, and educating people from the citizenship means that there are more professionals on hand to help those people.
• War within a country. In the case of war, we can immediately see how education may help that country in the future. A simple matter of a more morally principled next generation could be a solution to this. War causes poverty because war is often reckless. To reduce the impact of war is very difficult, so the best effort is to reduce fatalities by simple First Aid training, which is an example of a small scale project making a large difference.
• Natural disasters within a country. With natural disasters, it must be understood that no amount of education will avoid them, but their impacts can still be reduced. Education is a good tool in reducing the impact because people can be trained to improve defence systems against floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, landslides, amongst others. An architect is an educated person, and the designs put forward by an especially good one increase the chance of a building collapsing in an earthquake. A seismologist is not the average person from the street either. Providing just a little early warning will reduce the impact of a natural disaster. This links with poverty because poverty is often a result of a natural disaster; homes are destroyed, crops flattened. Reducing the impact will reduce poverty

Although this is just a small cross section, I hope this helps to piece together a larger picture of education and poverty. Poverty is not a simple cause and effect. It has many causes and many results. Education equips a generation to come with the necessary skills to flourish and ultimately eradicate poverty. I did generalise, but I would be surprised if the answer was found insufficient. Poverty does not exist only in Africa, but is present around the world. Africa often has the worst poverty, but it not the only poverty, so I would also put poverty into this wider context for you. The role of education in Africa, as elsewhere, in poverty eradication is down to multiple ways in which education infiltrates all classes, resulting in the empowerment to do more than would have been expected, and even to do what may seem impossible: eradicate poverty.