Behind the beautiful poverty alleviation strategies

Recently I began reading Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity by Katherine Boo for another class. The book is about life in the Annawadi slum outside of Mumbai. The book has given me quite a bit to think about given that it is about slum-living and my PE org works in slums. One aspect of the book that I find particularly thought-provoking is that it touches upon various slum poverty alleviation strategies adopted by the government and describes how the strategies become subverted in their actual implementation.

One example is a government program designed to "encourage financially vulnerable women to pool their savings and make low-interest loans to one another in times of need." Boo describes how Asha, one of the more powerful residents of the slum, and her self-help group began a scheme to lend their pooled money to even poorer women at high interest rates in order to reap a profit. Boo also describes how Asha is often used by government officials as a poster child to demonstrate how successful the program is to foreign female journalists. Asha knows what the officials want the foreigners to think about the program, and so she puts on a performance playing to the emotions of the foreign women, describing how she has been empowered by the government scheme. On the side, to her children, however, Asha says, "The big people think that because we are poor we don't understand much." But as Boo describes, "Asha understood plenty."

My PE org similarly attempts to establish women's collectives through which slum-dwelling women can support each other. What strikes me about the anecdote from Boo's book is that no matter how good poverty alleviation programs sound, the truth is that they are often inherently condescending in so far as their goal is to "empower" women. It is impossible to ignore the power dynamics inherent in poverty alleviation programs which attempt to uplift the poor. What this example demonstrates to me is that life is complex and poverty is even more so. It's easy to use this case to demonize the poor as manipulative or to dismiss government welfare programs as inevitably ineffective. However what also strikes me about this case is that it helps to deconstruct the quintessential image that gets painted of poor women as passive victims who need help rising up. If rich financial players like Bernie Madoff can construct lucrative money making schemes to scam people out of money, so too can the poor. However, the argument that often gets ignored is that unlike Madoff, perhaps the poor have an even better reason to try to steal people's money - namely to lift themselves out of poverty. Of course that's not the best argument to make, but it is one which can't be ignored. One take-away might be that such government programs should be done away with in order to circumvent manipulation. Another take-away might be people are creatures of circumstance who do what it takes to navigate those circumstances, regardless of their socioeconomic status.

But the questions raised by the scenario described by Boo persist: Knowing that these government programs can be subverted, should we get rid of them? Or should we impose more stringent criteria for participation in the programs, potentially excluding some participants (like the arguments in favor of drug testing welfare recipients in the US)? Or should we just accept that some manipulation of financial systems occurs at every level of society and continue to provide the programs as they are?