The Global 99%

We’ve spent the overwhelming majority of the last two months trying to make sense of things. We started with a French immersion program so we could understand a language common throughout the region. We traveled to different parts of different countries to see how people live: their homes, their livelihoods, their food, their transport and their values. We tried to build a holistic itinerary to get the best primer possible on the opportunities and challenges facing West Africa.

Open bathroom trenches into the street sidewalk.

After touching the various parts of the elephant, our observations and experiences have left us exhausted and conflicted. Our questions span the gamut from the philosophical (how do people who habitually have nothing have so much generosity?); to the economic (how are the people of Mali going to survive this year when they experienced lower than average rainfall for their crops and the international community has imposed travel warnings against tourism?); to the political (how can the world continue to turn its back on this region?)

This trip is important for us to gain a better knowledge of West Africa, but it’s impossible to understand this region without also seeing the broader global context.

The United Nations Development Programme recently published its annual Human Development Report. This internationally regarded document tries to explain at a global level the definitions of, trends of, and challenges facing human development. The Human Development Index (HDI) measures three basic dimensions—life expectancy, educational attainment and income—across all nations in the world. The results, virtually the same from last year, are what one would expect: Europe and the Middle East lead the regions, towering over Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. 

Below is a reproduction of some countries of note:

What stood out for us in this report is the statistical and academic description of what we’ve experienced through our travels, but until now, have had a hard time articulating: poor people in the world disproportionately get the shaft; poor people in the world disproportionately carry a double (if not triple) burden of deprivation.

Washing at the river before the cows cross

The 2011 Human Development Report focuses this year on the link between human development and environmental sustainability. Specifically, it details how populations in lesser developed countries are more vulnerable to environmental changes. Overall, the poorest regions seem to have gotten hotter (but not much wetter) in the past several years. As a result, people in these regions suffer more severe stresses, such as increased natural disasters, increased spread of disease like malaria and dengue fever, and increased malnutrition due to decreased crop yields.  Additionally, they tend to have fewer means or technologies to adapt to these stresses (lower river levels means they spend more time each day fetching water, keeping families working harder to grow fewer crops for subsistence or having less to sell at the market).
 

In many cases the most disadvantaged people bear and will continue to bear the repercussions of environmental deterioration, even if they contribute little to the problem themselves. In cruel irony, low HDI countries contribute the least to global climate change, but they have experienced the greatest loss in rainfall and the greatest increase in temperature, with implications for agricultural production and livelihoods. While we are choked by the output of poor-performing diesel vehicles and we see a yellow haze congeal around the city at each sunset, it’s important to remember that the average UK citizen accounts for as much greenhouse gas emissions in two months as a person in a low HDI country generates in a year.

Seats from computer monitor e-waste  (Bamako photo exhibit)

In addition to big picture environmental factors, people in low HDI countries also must deal with environmental threats to their immediate surroundings: indoor air pollution, dirty water and poor sanitation.  More than 6 people in 10 lack ready access to clean water, contributing to both disease and malnutrition.  Nearly 4 in 10 people lack sanitary toilets. And indoor air pollution kills 11 times more people living in low HDI countries than people elsewhere.  In every village we’ve seen, most cooking is done with small charcoal stoves, heating well or river water where people also bathe, and waste (both human and household) is left in the yard for roving animals or siphoned back to the river through open sewer trenches. 

As the report outlines, global and immediate environmental factors have direct, undeniable outcomes in each of the three issue areas:

Health and Life Expectancy

Each year environment-related diseases, including acute respiratory infections and diarrhea, kill at least 3 million children under age 5—more than the entire under-five populations of Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland combined.  In Mali, one in five children dies before the age of five. This shocking statistic was reinforced when we learned that days before we arrived in Djenne, our guide lost his five year old son for, as he explained, “no apparent reason.” Being here has put a human face on these statistics.

  

Charcoal cook stove

Educational Attainment

Forecasts suggest that continuing failure to reduce grave environmental risks will also significantly exacerbate social inequalities in education.  When food and water are the primary objectives of the day, education becomes a luxury.  Last week, we met a man who explained that his one bag of rice this year yielded less than what it had in previous years because of low rains, thus causing hunger for his family and limiting income that would have been used for schooling. In fact, nearly 3 in 10 children of school age children in low HDI countries are not enrolled in school.  Without electricity, study time is limited to day hours, and time is often diverted to collecting cooking fuel and water, activities shown to slow education progress and lower school enrollment.

Economic Opportunity and Poverty

And finally, projections suggest that environmental factors threaten to slow (or even reverse) decades of sustained economic progress by the world’s poor majority. Beginning in 2010, the Human Development Report introduced a “multidimensional poverty index” to explain the phenomenon that people in poor countries experience compounding negative factors.  In a chicken-and-egg scenario, those countries with the greatest intensity of environmental deprivations also had populations living in the most severe poverty.  What’s interesting is that the standards of poverty were not only low when set against the global poverty index (earning less than $1.25 per day), but that the low HDI countries had a greater percentage of their population that fell below each nation’s self-determined poverty line. The gap between classes in the developing world is widening even here.  And, as we meet with people who are facing the loss of crop or tourism income, they are palpably feeling their economic power decrease further.   

At this writing, we are four countries in to our eight-nation trip.  None of the countries we will visit will rank higher than 135 out of the 187 nations listed in the Human Development Index.  Nonetheless, the people that we have met are undoubtedly wealthy with assets that aren’t measured by these charts:  generosity, perseverance, resilience, commitment to family, and commitment to culture.  With that backdrop, the disparity of what is happening with these nations feels even more unjust.  And how can we as people now invested in the future of this region contribute to human development?