I'm not usually a fan of institutional blogs. When a big NGO creates a blog it's often for solely promotional purposes, and much of what I find interesting is criticism. Also, blogs are often written by younger, lower-level staff who don't necessarily have the same freedom to innovate and must have their posts approved by higher-ups. One of the few blogs associated with an NGO that does make it into my Google Reader is From Poverty to Power by Duncan Green at Oxfam. This post at the end of July caught my eye: "By 2015 Nigeria will have more poor people than India or China."
This post highlights two ideas that I've come across again and again in the last year, which make me most optimistic and hesitant about the near future:
- A much, much smaller percentage of the world lives in extreme poverty today than 30-40 years ago.
- Most of that decline has been driven by reductions in India and especially in China. Thus, as those nations continue to see reductions and many countries in Africa lag behind, the largest countries in Africa with the youngest populations (ie, Nigeria) will soon outpace India and China in terms of absolute numbers living in the worst poverty. While some African countries -- I'm thinking of Nigeria and South Africa in particular -- have considerable resources to devote to poverty alleviation, when they choose to, those resources pale in comparison to those available to say, the Chinese state.
The commenters on the original post also highlight some important methodological limitations in the Brookings study that Green cited. Read it all here.