POVERTY - Addressing the Causes

[Peace Portal]

Poverty is an effect, to solve a problem one must address the "cause."

To truly address poverty we need to recognize that it is the result of all the other inter-dependent sectors of life, from education to health care, access to technology and natural resources, most importantly what Human Rights you have.

There are many kinds of poverty, the causes of which vary depending on where you're looking, a rich country or a poor county.

As we enter the Information Age, humanity has real potential to address the "causes of poverty" in both rich and poor countries alike. The technological fixes available are the easy part, the hard part is having a cooperative spirit with greater respect for the Human Rights of a diverse humanity, if we can achieve that we will succeed in all that follows.

In poorer countries practical coordinated action needs to be taken to;

• Improve supplies of clean water, to reduce time spent gathering often foul water and reduce illness caused by foul water supplies.
• Improve the supply of accessible, affordable health care information and services, to reduce the vulnerability to disease of children and the elderly especially.
• Improve training and equipment of farmers in poor countries related to agriculture and natural resource management, include help with seeds and expertise from groups like ECHO.
• Increase access to education in combination with Information Age technology such as computers, ICT Systems, and cell phones via communty Access Points.
• Relieve countries of the "Interest" charged on their debt, and reduce debt.
• Help governments to outside help sustainable development help for non-governmental organizations, non-profits, and health missionaries.

In richer countries coordinated action should be taken to;

• Improve the quality of educational opportunities and incentives with emphasis on the poor.
• Increase diplomacy, international cooperation, and sustainable trade options to decrease necessity of future growing military expenditure. Make friends of foes, now the world is so interdependent we must cooperate; as individuals we do it all the time, now our governments acting as our collective voice needs to pursue options that lead to greater Peace.
  
• Improve work training and apprenticeship incentives for the poor to focus on new Information Age opportunities. Using the Internet an individual can now get a job with someone else or work for themselves by offering their knowledge, art, music, and time. The industrial age is coming to a close, we need to educate for the new world because the factory jobs in places like Detroit are not coming back; we need to train for the present and future.
  
• Increase the use of local exchange systems in communities to increase recycling, keep more wealth in the local economy for it's development, and stregthen community ties between the living people creating or growing available goods.

[Free Digital Universe]

Root Cause Analysis: If I have an unwanted situation which consumes resources and tends to happen in a repeated fashion then there is a possibility that it might be beneficial to figure out what is really causing this situation to occur and remove it so the situation does not occur again. This is generally referred to as Root Cause Analysis, finding the real cause of the problem and dealing with it rather than simply continuing to deal with the symptoms. This raises several questions:

* How does one determine which situations are candidates for root cause analysis?
* How does one figure out what the root cause is?
* Does the removal of the cause entail less resource expenditure than it takes to continue to deal with the symptom?

Determining Candidates
In normal chaotic organizational environments it is often quite difficult to find candidates for root cause analysis because the situations which repeat are either distributed over time so one doesn't realize they are actually recurring, or the situation happens to different people so there isn't an awareness of the recurring nature of the situation. When an organization is using a an automated problem resolution support system, such as SolutionBuilder, it is very easy to determine which situations are recurring with what frequency. Every time a solution is used its frequency counter gets updated, so all one has to do is run reports against the system to determine which solutions are being used with what frequency. Those situations which are recurring with the greatest frequency and consume the greatest amount of resource to rectify are the candidates for root cause analysis.

Finding the Root Cause
Most situations which arise within an organizational context have multiple approaches to resolution. These different approaches generally require different levels of resource expenditure to execute. And, due to the immediacy which exists in most organizational situations there is a tendency to opt for the solution which is the most expedient in terms of dealing with the situation. In doing this the tendency is generally to treat the symptom rather than the underlying fundamental problem that is actually responsible for the situation occurring. Yet, in taking the most expeditious approach and dealing with the symptom, rather than the cause, what is generally ensured is that the situation will, in time, return and need to be dealt with again.
To find root causes there is one really only one question that's relevant, "What can we learn from this situation?" Research has repeatedly proven that unwanted situations within organizations are about 95% related to process problems and only 5% related to personnel problems. Yet, most organizations spend far more time looking for culprits than causes and because of this misdirected effort seldom really gain the benefit they could gain from understanding the foundation of the unwanted situation.