What causes Poverty

Poverty is firstly about powerlessness. Poverty does not arise from the inequitable distribution of food but from disempowering people, taking away their power over their own land, their own food producing resources. Colonisation and “Cash Crop” loans have in common a mentality of “civilizing” a people while stripping them of power over their own land. So, ultimately, we destroy poverty by empowering people to change their own lives. Promoting “economic growth” at a national level will never “trickle down” to those at the bottom of the heap. However, while I tend towards the "left" there is a weakness in left wing ideology which sees wealth as like a cake of a set size which simply needs to be divided equitably. What happens when we think like that is that we disempower people and teach them to be dependent upon endless handouts. And then the wealth of a whole community diminishes. The cake, actually, gets smaller and smaller. The economy of the whole nation shrinks. Wealth can be created at a grass roots level through empowering people to start their own small business ventures, through nurturing entrepreneurship. Many marginalized women throughout the world have been empowered by helping them start small businesses and helping them survive the pitfalls of running and sustaining a small business. Small business people have to work incredibly hard to succeed, way harder that the average wage earner. Yet for poor people who have lived with no power, and no hope of changing their situation, such a hard road is a welcome one, a road that give hope of a different future. And if we multiply small business in a community, we grow the wealth of that whole nation from the bottom up instead of pouring money into the hands of those who already have the most power. With this kind of grass roots help we reduce the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest in a nation while growing the whole nation’s wealth.