"How can we begin to empower impoverished countries to be able to support themselves?" - @lavender22
While many organizations want to be a blessing to those less fortunate, many only provide temporary relief that fails to address the root problems affecting impoverished communities. First of all, I want to make it clear that I believe that providing aid, especially through private charity, is an abundantly good thing that people should continue to do. I believe, however, that if these organizations truly want to create a lasting impact on the communities that they serve, they need to do more than provide aid, but also provide opportunities. Secondly, I would like to note that around 200 years ago, during the birth of capitalism, about 94% of the world lived in extreme poverty. In contrast, that number has fallen to just 9.6% in 2015, with over 50 million people still escaping extreme poverty every year(Zitelmann). It is also important to note that poverty is the natural state of humankind, so it is quite miraculous that most of the world is steadily increasing its standard of living.
While many may see the rise of capitalism as a problem because of the widening income gap between the rich and the poor, I believe that the more important and often overlooked aspect of this data is that most of the world is no longer starving. With this in mind, one of the best things that organizations that wish to help people escape poverty can do is to teach them about free markets. Organizations could help the impoverished increase their skillsets by developing marketable skills, teaching entrepreneurship, and allowing the impoverished to have access to loans or funds to start their own business which will later be used to create jobs for others. One of the unfortunate aspects of providing free resources to those in need is that it appears to harm the few small businesses that exist in those areas, so they need all the help they can get to get these businesses back on their feet. This also means that aid has to be temporary because nobody is going to pay for something that they can receive for free. While this may seem a more cruel way of helping people, giving individuals the tools that they need to help themselves is almost always more effective at reducing extreme poverty, especially in the long run. The goal needs to be to help people escape poverty, not just to survive it.
Works Cited
Zitelmann, Rainer. Forbes, www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzitelmann/2020/07/27/anyone-who-doesnt-know-the-following-facts-about-capitalism-should-learn-them/?sh=3c698bb63dc1.