In this chapter the historical context of the term ‘Developing World’ will be investigated to give a brief description of the theme dealt with in this paper. It will also look into the issues associated with the developing world, and further examine the previous strategies used. The first chapter will be divided into three parts; whereas the first part will consider briefly the historical aspect; the second part will look into the issues concerning the developing world; and the third part will look into the strategies.
According to Edward Smethurst Simpson there are many existing terms used to describe the underprivileged world. One of the most commonly used, and yet a misused term was to refer to the poorer world to the third world. This term reminisce the categorisation of the world after the Second World War, and indicated the political, economical and social partitions. However, the use of the Third world term can be outdated for its purpose. Another term is to divide the world between the North, and the South. This can only be justified if Australia and New Zealand are defined as the North. Furthermore, there are many similar terms as undeveloped, under developed, least developed and less developed. The term used in this paper to describe the underprivileged world will be the developing world. This term is defined by the finance web page as ‘A term used to describe countries that lack strong amounts of industrialization, infrastructure, and sophisticated technology, but are beginning to build these capabilities.’
The issues in the ‘Developing World’ all seem to be related, and they all work together to decrease the standards of the country. Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, in his book ‘Small is Beautiful’, suggested that the main reasons to poverty rather than being related to ‘material factors’ was caused by the lack of education, organisation and discipline. He further stated that the material factors are entirely secondary. This could help to explain why all the problems seem to be inter-related. Even though the problems visible are materialistic problems, the underlying reason is the lack of education, organisation and discipline.
As Schumacher implied there are several issues that creates poverty. The issues works like in a vicious circle, where the issues tend to enlarge each other. For example, the lack of infrastructure prevents production efficiency in the developing country to be high enough to make money of it due to not having the electricity needed, or not having a well built road system to get the goods out of the country. In addition, to manage to sell the goods they would have to sell with no profit, to be able compete with other existing productions which can make the products with higher efficiency.
Education suffers due to lack of profits and the distribution of wealth among certain classes feeds imbalances between the rich and the poor. Furthermore, the imbalance in the developing countries results in the risk of all the funding given to the country as charity or loan, only ends up with the people already managing well and perhaps even creating corruption amongst the inhabitants of the country. The diamond trade in Sierra Leone in the 1990’s are a classic depiction of countries poor infrastructure that combined all the issues aforementioned. These diamonds are often referred to as ‘Blood Diamonds’ and are those that are mined in war zones in order to finance warlords, dictatorships, insurgencies and to fund wars fought.
After looking into the issues of the developing world, this second part will investigate in the different strategies on the developing world problem which has been used throughout the time.
According to United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the strategies for the ‘Developing World’ has been more like ‘fire-fighting’, trying to deal with problems when they occur, rather than preventing them. Peter Burnell, a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, investigated the role of charities in Britain in the last decade of the previous century. According to Burnell there are several hundred charities in Britain with the developing world as a main focus area.
Burnell suggest that there are several groups of charity; these can be divided into multi-functional organisation, which are concerned with all different types of charity. This being disaster relief, helping refugees, working on development projects, doing policy research and advocacy and developing education. They also work to uncover and challenge the causes of poverty. Another type of charity would be the specific clientele or highly specialised service which aims at a much narrower cause. These charities specify on childrens aid, helping the aged or even refugees or people suffering from natural disasters.
Charity will help people in the short run, but they will never be able to support themselves. There will always be the need for more charity. Another worry is that it is difficult to see whether the money given actually reaches the purpose of the charity, or if they only create a greater gap down to the poor and the people that really need the help. By adding money to a rather poor country, there is always the risk of increasing the imbalance in the country by allowing the richer to get richer and the poor to get poorer.
Another strategy for helping the developing world is Doctors Without Borders or Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), where the focus of their work is to provide medical help in the field, rather than collecting money. According to their homepage, MSF offers emergency aid in more than 70 countries. By helping in the fields, the help will be given to those who is in need, not to someone that is able to get the hold of the funding
After exploring the issues and strategies in the developing world, this second chapter will investigate the designer’s response to the needs of the developing world, and how the current design organisations approaches the challenges of the developing world. The chapter will focus mainly on three organisations; Practical Action; Design for the World and Design Without Borders. It will explain the terms used for design in the developing world and look into the changes that occurred.
In his book, ‘Small is Beautiful ‘, Schumacher gives examples of strategies to how to help the ‘Developing World’. Schumacher was a revolutionary economist with thoughts about how to help the developing world. His strategies were prior to his time. Schumacher’s philosophy was that there were two existing technologies, one simple technology which did not offer very much efficiency. This was the technology that was dominant in the developing world. In the western world, Schumacher observed that the sophisticated technology was the leading tool. The idea was that to implement the sophisticated technology to a country which was unable to afford using it, or even maintaining it would be a waste of resources. However, He also saw the need to improve and make the existing technology more efficient. This is how the term Intermediate Technology came to a beginning, by introducing a technology that would bridge the gap between the primitive, and the sophisticated tools. As mentioned previously he suggested that the main reasons to poverty were lack of education, organisation and discipline, rather than materialistic reasons. Schumacher’s strategy he defined as 'find out what people are doing and help them to do it better'. To prove his statements in his book, he established Practical Action former known as ITDG (the Intermediate Technology Development Group) in 1966. ITDG changed their name to Practical Action- Technology Challenging Poverty in 2005 to better demonstrate what work and focus area the implement.
Practical Action’s approach to improve the life for the people in the developing world is based around four key areas. The first one is to reduce the vulnerability due to the fact that the most vulnerable people are the poor people.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment