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December 1999
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Division for Social Policy and Development
Department of Economic and Social Affairs
UNITED NATIONS, NEW YORK

 

 

 

 

 

 

Redefining 

Human Rights-Based Development :
The Wresinski Approach to Partnership With the Poorest

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In preparation for the second session of the Preparatory Committee for the Special Session
of the General Assembly in the Year 2000 for an overall review and appraisal of
the implementation of the outcome of the World Summit for Social Development
December 1999

 

 

 

 

 

under the responsibility of its president, Alwine A. de Vos van Steenwijk, 
and in close collaboration with Huguette Redegeld, Quyen Tran, Rosemarie Tran-Hoffmann, Diana Skelton,
Béatrice Noyer, Annelise Oeschger, Antonius Redegeld and Jean Tonglet.

 

With acknowledgements to the following contributors :

Francoise Coré, Angela Evosevic, Moya Amateau, Colette Jay, Nicole Kiefer and Andrew Hayes

International Movement ATD Fourth World - 107, Avenue du Général Leclerc- 95480 Pierrelaye, France.
Site web ATD Quart Monde, Tapori  

 

Redefining Human Rights-Based Development :
The Wresinski Approach to Partnership With the Poorest

 

 

 

Contents

 

Introduction 

a. Context and objectives of this paper
b. Eradication of poverty : an overview of the current situation 
c. Identification issues : What is extreme poverty ? Who are the poorest ? 

Part One : 

Partnership with the Poorest - Towards a Culture for Overcoming Poverty

1.1 The poorest, creators at every step of the partnership

a. Discovering hidden realities

b. Basing projects on the aspirations of the poorest
c. Strengthening the family unit
d. Building on existing solidarity
e. Shaping in-depth knowledge with the poorest
f. The poorest renewing creativity and cultural achievement

1.2 Guidelines drawn from experience 

a. Conditions for partnership with the poorest

- Investing the time needed
- Trust and confidence
- Commitment to working with one another
- Reciprocal training
- Consensus building and broad-based participation 

b. Obstacles to partnership 

1.3 Indicators of success for partnership with the poorest 

- Becoming less isolated
- Being able to contribute and receive 
- Building on past struggles
- Emerging talents
- Gaining knowledge and speaking out
- When the very poor show how to reach out to others

1.4 A meeting of the minds : 

Universities and the very poor building a basis for knowledge together

1.5 Partnership with the poorest guarantees full citizenship for all

Part Two : Redefining Work and Human Activity to Enhance Social Integration

 

2.1 The right of the poorest to freely chosen productive work and employment 

a. The quest of the poorest for economic autonomy and personal and social identity
b. Current responses to unemployment and their impact on the poorest

Social welfare
Welfare-to-work programmes and various « integration schemes »
Economic solidarity
Training
Development of the informal economic sector
Micro-finance programmes

c. A different perspective on human development that starts with the poorest

2.2 The right for everyone to be creative and useful 

a. Creative social and political action
b. Art and cultural activities

2.3 Towards a harmonious distribution of opportunities in all fields of human endeavor

 

 

Part Three : Further Initiatives

The Wresinski Approach - Redefining Human Development

3.1 Social integration

a. Harmony and cultural enrichment : Reaching the poorest
b. People of diverse backgrounds making a personal commitment
c. Leadership in the commitment to fighting poverty

3.2 Full employment 

a. Ensuring a decent livelihood and training opportunities for very poor workers
b. Transforming times of forced unemployed into times of human advancement
c. Redefining transition times between different human activities

3.3 Eradication of poverty

a. Partnership with the poorest in designing comprehensive national policies for eradicating poverty
b. Implementing the recommendations made at regional and international levels

c. A Convention for Overcoming Human Poverty 

 

Appendix : Background concerning the International Movement ATD Fourth World

Selected References

 

 

Introduction

 

a. Context and objectives of this paper

 

At the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995, the Governments of 186 countries committed themselves to the goals of eradicating poverty and achieving full employment and social integration. With unprecedented momentum, they adopted a Programme of Action that underscored the importance of social development for ensuring the well-being of all. 

To fulfil their commitments, some governments have formulated policies and strategies in accordance with this Programme of Action. Now, five years later, the Governments have agreed to review the achievements they have made and the obstacles they encountered in implementing the three core issues agreed upon at Copenhagen. They intend to propose further initiatives in order to pursue, with renewed political will and means, the commitments they made.

This is the context in which the International Movement ATD Fourth World submits the present paper, five years after contributing proposals for the Copenhagen Summit under the title : "To reconsider human activity in order to fight poverty and exclusion."

The current paper is presented under the general heading "the Wresinski Approach. » It is inspired by the legacy of the late Fr. Joseph Wresinski (see box), founder of the Movement. It is also rooted in the day-to-day commitment of the full-time volunteers and members of the Movement alongside some of the poorest of the world’s citizens.

The first part of this paper will address the issue of partnership with the poorest, and with their organisations, constituting a key element of social development. Within this framework, their participation in the economic, social and cultural life of their societies will be looked at. The second part will attempt to redefine work and human activity so as to enhance social integration. Finally, proposals will be made for further initiatives towards the implementation of the Summit’s commitments.

 

Fr. Joseph Wresinski (1917-1988) founded the International Movement ATD Fourth World in 1957. He authored the report Grande pauvreté et précarité économique et sociale (Chronic Poverty and Lack of Basic Security), which was commissioned by the Economic and Social Council of France, and later adopted by this council, of which he was a member. This report paved the way for substantial work undertaken by the UN Commission for Human Rights, the European Union, and the Council of Europe. It also paved the way for the law against social exclusion that was adopted by France in July 1998. In 1987, Fr. Wresinski launched the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (17 October), later recognised by the UN General Assembly. Born into poverty, Joseph Wresinski established major landmarks throughout his life in the fight against the worst forms of poverty, in collaboration with other partners and the very poor themselves. He also developed a blueprint for a civilisation without exclusion based on his work in the field of human activity, a civilisation with the contributions of all people, and for the benefit of all.

 

 

* * * * * *

 

In this paper, progress in eradicating poverty and achieving full employment and social integration will be reviewed in the light of the experience of people living in extreme poverty. Therefore, prior to developing the issue of partnership and proposing a redefinition of human development, it may be useful to present an overview of the background of poverty eradication. Some of the terminology that will be used throughout this document will be explained - extreme poverty, the poorest, and partnership.

b. Eradication of poverty : an overview of the current situation 

 

§   High speed globalisation and its effects on poverty

 

The current world situation presents a paradox. While high-speed globalisation is broadening opportunities for a better life for many, it has also endangered the livelihoods of the poor, thus increasing poverty and social exclusion and worsening the health of many people around the world. Progress in communication and information technologies holds out the promise of universal access to knowledge, while half of the inhabitants of the planet have never made a telephone call. 

While acknowledging the progress made in many parts of the world, we must keep clearly in mind that development will not benefit all if our practices are not improved. If current trends continue, the world will not meet the International Development Goal of halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015, nor will it meet the Universal Primary Education Goal of reducing adult illiteracy by three quarters by 2015.[1] 

One hundred million more people live in poverty today than a decade ago. Half of humanity - 3 billion of the total 6 billion - live on an income of less than $2 a day, and 1.3 billion live on less than $1 a day, in a global economy of 25 trillion US dollars. One and a half billion people still lack access to safe water, and 2.4 million children die each year of waterborne diseases. One hundred and twenty-five million children still lack access to primary school. 

Prospects in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa are not promising, as evidenced by the declines in adult literacy and in the educational attainment of children. Malnutrition and infant mortality rates are worsening, while standards of health and average life expectancy have been dramatically hurt by the HIV-AIDS pandemic. 

Due to the financial crisis in Southeast Asia, many countries have lost in a few months most of the benefits of the economic gains of the past two decades. Setbacks in reducing poverty have been noted in countries where growth was negative. Even where growth does start again, the poor will not automatically recoup their lost positions. "Neither moderate growth (up to four per cent per capita) nor high growth (above four per cent) was any guarantee of poverty reduction."[2]

Poverty and social exclusion are not only southern phenomena. They affect economies in transition. They also affect industrialised countries, where 30 million people are unemployed. Of the European Union’s 400 million inhabitants, 60 million live under the poverty line (which is put at 50 percent below a country’s average income), and 2.7 million are homeless. 

Whether in Africa, Asia, Europe or elsewhere, in every community wounded by poverty, we continue to see countless efforts being made to emerge from this situation, both by public officials and by the people in civil society - community groups, local associations and civic leaders. The current crises make it all the more important to pay tribute to the courage of these efforts, which generally go unacknowledged.

 

§  The world’s perception of extreme poverty is evolving 

 

Whereas poverty was once considered inevitable, there is recognition today that the world has the resources and the capacity to eradicate absolute poverty.[3]

A factor of progress in this regard is a shift in the comprehension of extreme poverty. Grassroots groups and non-governmental organisations have long advocated a comprehensive approach to extreme poverty. They introduced the understanding that extreme poverty is multidimensional, not only limited to income, but also affecting livelihood, health, education and housing, as well as social, cultural and political participation.[4] This understanding is gaining currency. For example, the Human Development Report of UNDP introduces into world discussion the concept of human poverty that focuses on the "denial of opportunities and choices most basic to human development - to lead a long, healthy, creative life and to enjoy a decent standard of living, freedom, dignity, self-esteem, and the respect of others." That report thus considered the poorest people « not as passive victims but as leading actors struggling against a process of impoverishment."[5]

This multidimensional approach to poverty is paralleled by an integrated understanding of human rights, in which civil and political rights are indivisible from social, economic and cultural rights. In adopting the Final Report on Human Rights and Extreme Poverty,[6] the United Nations helped advance this understanding - that extreme poverty is an affront to human dignity and a denial of human rights and, therefore, that freedom from poverty is an integral and inalienable human right. Also in 1996, the United Nations inaugurated in the garden of its headquarters a replica of a commemorative stone[7] engraved with the following statement signed by Joseph Wresinski : "Wherever men and women are condemned to live in extreme poverty, human rights are violated. To come together to ensure that these rights be respected is our solemn duty. » This understanding that poverty violates human rights means that not a single person can be left out in the drive to completely eradicate poverty.

A major change has also occurred in mainstream development thinking through the recognition that reducing poverty is not an automatic by-product of economic growth. « Development must move beyond economic growth to encompass important social goals - reduced poverty, improved quality of life, enhanced opportunities for better education and health, and more. »[8]

As a consequence of these changes, today’s approach to overcoming poverty recognises that poverty and social exclusion cannot be tackled through single-faceted measures or supposedly immediate solutions. Eradicating poverty requires long-term, cross-sectoral action : not only must it encompass development strategy, but it must also be a priority of all public policies.

 

c. Identification issues  : What is extreme poverty ? Who are the poorest ? 

Several terms are used in the international community to refer to extreme poverty, such as « absolute poverty, » « acute poverty, » « deep poverty. » The Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action uses the terms « absolute poverty » or « extreme poverty, » as distinct from « overall poverty. » 

The multidimensional aspect of poverty and of its consequences has been underscored in the Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action. Poverty has various manifestations, including lack of income and productive resources sufficient to ensure sustainable livelihoods, hunger and malnutrition, increased morbidity and mortality from illness, limited or no access to education and other basic services, homelessness and inadequate housing, unsafe environments, and social discrimination and exclusion. It is also characterised by a lack of participation in decision-making and in civil, social and cultural life. The obvious characteristic of life in extreme poverty is therefore an accumulation of mutually reinforcing types of insecurity. Not only do these types of insecurity have unavoidable effects on each other but, as they increase and intensify, exclusion becomes worse and starts to erode family and social life.

Various definitions of poverty have been advanced in order to better target and thus better reach the populations for which policies are set up. The following definition, proposed as early as 1987 and subsequently taken up by several national authorities and the international community, offers a clear understanding of the cycle of poverty and of the ways to overcome extreme poverty :

 

"The lack of basic security means the absence of one or more of the factors that enable individuals and families to assume basic responsibilities and to enjoy fundamental rights. Such a situation may vary in extent, its consequences can vary in gravity and may to a greater or lesser extent be irreversible. The lack of basic security leads to chronic poverty when it simultaneously affects several aspects of life, when it is prolonged and when it severely compromises people’s chances of regaining their rights and of reassuming their responsibilities in the foreseeable future."[9]

 

This definition clarifies both the similarities and the differences between situations of poverty and situations of extreme poverty ; both situations appear to be due to similar phenomena, varying essentially in number, extent and duration. It also pinpoints the continuum between poverty and extreme poverty ; the persistence of multiple types of insecurity over a long period, sometimes several generations, can contribute to the deterioration of a situation of poverty into one of extreme poverty. 

In this regard, the term « the poorest » is used in this document to mean more than designating the population on the lower extreme of a poverty-wealth axis. It also refers to the people hardest to reach within a poor community, the families whose participation in a project is crucial.[10] Identifying « the poorest » implies a process of questioning : Who are the poorest ? Why are they not reached ? How can they be reached ? This questioning becomes the guideline for planning community development and for improving projects so that they include all. (See box.)

 

Indicators of Extreme Poverty

 

Wherever ATD Fourth World runs projects, it tries to identify those families who are the most vulnerable because of extreme poverty compounded by isolation or exclusion from their own community. It gives priority to these families in the sense that they become « reference » families for the programmes to be designed and carried out. This is a key tool to ensure that a given project will affect the root causes of exclusion.   The projects run by ATD Fourth World in Guatemala illustrate the effort of focusing on the poorest. Among the 300 families who regularly took part in projects in 1997, twenty were considered « reference » families. The reasons for this choice are illustrated through the lives of six of them. One family lives in a hamlet (aldea) in the east of the country. The other families live in the capital, with one of them camping alongside the railroad tracks and another one in front of a public dump. Although many other families live in similar conditions in these same marginalised areas, these families are worse off than their neighbours, as evidenced by the following facts.

 

§  In the hamlet where one of these families lives, municipal projects have provided electricity and running water in the last two years. This family, however, was the only one that did not benefit from either project. During the first project, they simply were not taken into account by the community. For the second, they could not afford the participation fee. 

§  In one of the families living in the capital, the mother gave birth to a baby in a hospital in 1997. After a few days, she was told that that her baby daughter had been transferred elsewhere, without any explanation, and that she could not see her. Since that moment, the mother has found no trace of her daughter. 

§  Among the four other families living in the capital, none of the children of school age attended school in 1996.

  These are not isolated facts, and additional ones could be cited. They show that, while many families live in poor conditions in the same areas, some of them are worse off than their neighbours. Even in the very poorest communities in this country, it rarely happens that a mother is prohibited from raising her own child. As for the family living in the hamlet, being the only one that did not benefit from two projectsthat were meant for the whole community indicates greater hardship for this family. Finally, concerning schooling, most parents in this capital manage, although with great efforts, to send at least one or two children to school despite dire poverty. Therefore, the non-attendance of any of the children of the four families mentioned above can be seen as an indicator of their absolute poverty.

It is more and more widely recognised that programmes designed to reduce poverty often miss those most in need. As early as 1989, a report by UNICEF indicated that 20% of the people for whom its programmes were designed were not reached.[11] Many actors have made efforts to identify the causes of this and to remedy it. It is with this concern in mind that the Social Summit emphasised the need to acquire better quantitative and qualitative information about the poorest sector in any given society and to evaluate the persistence of poverty and the effectiveness of strategies to eradicate poverty from the qualitative standpoint.[12]

This introduction has been intended to heed those concerns by bringing precision to the terminology that will be used throughout this document. Our work is guided by one essential requirement : the identification of those individuals, families or groups, who are or who shall be the focus of programmes and projects designed to end extreme poverty. The daily experience and thinking of these people form the standpoint from which analysis and proposals will be drawn in this paper.

 

 

 

 

* * * * * *

Part One : partnership with the poorest - 

TOWARDS a culture for overcoming poverty

 

 

The issue of partnership with poor families and communities has gained increased attention, as witnessed during the major international conferences and summits held under the auspices of the United Nations in the last decade. One can say that the United Nations is reflecting the importance accorded by a growing number of people and organisations to the respect of every human being’s dignity and rights, in harmony with the dignity of others (in the family, the community, the country and the world). In this sense, the United Nations is progressing towards the embodiment of the credo, « We, the peoples… »

In this light, partnership with the most destitute - millions of people throughout the world - must be understood within a perspective wider than that of having a say on matters concerning their lives. Full partnership leads to the development of a « culture for overcoming extreme poverty, » in which the « culture of peace » advocated by the United Nations plays a major role - with a special concern, in the decade to come, for putting the poorest children at the centre of this new culture.

The reflections developed here in Part One strive to illustrate how partnership with the poorest is the indispensable foundation for the promotion of a culture of peace, harmony, and equal rights, as proposed by the United Nations.

Building partnership with poor families and communities has long been advocated by people at the grassroots level as a key factor in eradicating poverty and achieving social integration. This awareness has entered the language of social development. The Copenhagen Summit formulated recommendations that Governments work in partnership with all development actors, in particular with people living in poverty and their organisations[13]. 

 

"People living in poverty and vulnerable groups must be empowered through organisations and participation in all aspects of political, economic and social life, in particular in the planning and implementation of policies that affect them, thus enabling them to become genuine partners in development."[14]

 

The empowerment of individuals and families so poor that they have been left out of everything for generations is not a goal easily reached. It must be approached first by building a genuine and sustainable partnership between these people and the rest of society. The nature of this partnership, its specificity, and its implications, especially in terms of human investment, must therefore be fully measured. On the basis of the International Movement ATD Fourth World’s forty years of experience in many parts of the world, as well as on the basis of findings from projects undertaken by many other non-governmental organisations[15], this section will first address common features conducive to the full participation of the poorest. Next, this section will address conditions for involving the poorest over the long term and developing reciprocal knowledge between them and other partners, as a basis for action. Finally, indicators of attainment of this partnership will be outlined.

 

1.1 The poorest, creators at every step of the partnership

Involving the poorest as genuine partners will not succeed as an add-on feature. Partnership should be conceived as an integral part of programmes and projects from the outset, and should constitute a requirement at each step of their development. 

 

a. Discovering hidden realities

The poorest suffer from prejudice or from being ignored by mainstream society. Prior to initiating any programme, getting acquainted with them is necessary to know the realities of their lives. Without such knowledge, meaningful partnership cannot be established.

For example, a person in Tanzania who is committed to supporting poor youth, was on his way to work one day when he discovered a group of families whose existence was ignored by others. They lived in shipwrecks that had been left on a beach to be sold later as scrap. Only at low tide was it possible to reach these people. Through repeated visits, the youth worker was introduced to other inhabitants of the squatted shipwreck cabins. Many children living there had been dismissed from overcrowded drop-in centres for children living in the street. Some of the adults survived by selling diesel oil stolen from a refinery. One of the men had three bouts of typhus and malaria fever over a period of one month. He described his efforts to find a regular job : "I had worked a whole day for just a meal as compensation. I was even lured into working for free, expecting to be hired longer if I worked well […]. Other people pretend that we are content with staying here, but what do they really know ? Do they know that we dream of living in a real house ?"

The search for the poorest individuals and groups is often facilitated by poor people themselves. This is evidenced in the experience of an anti-poverty programme of a city in Belgium, which included a committee mandated with collecting the input and soliciting the participation of the poorest. Facing the challenge of "meeting the most marginalised to foster a dialogue with them," committee members were greatly assisted by people experiencing hardship themselves. They introduced them to families who were taking refuge in a destitute neighbourhood : "They are experiencing very hard things. You must go and see them ; they can teach you a lot." These people, in their turn, helped the committee to reach others who were apparently unknown to the municipality.

 

b. Basing projects on the aspirations of the poorest

The poorest within a community are in a position to reveal what is fundamental. It is therefore important to take their expectations and aspirations into account when a project is developed. Apart from having the same basic needs as the rest of the community (water, education, health care, etc.), they experience other types of insecurity that require further resources and support.

Sometimes, it can be necessary to address their problems in an indirect way. The example of a health care project in a community of Guatemala afflicted with high infant mortality illustrates this. Parents were unable to control the nutrition of their young children. They felt powerless and were caught in sorrow and shame. A project was planned to fight early childhood malnutrition but, surprisingly, in the beginning very few of the poorest families took part in the project. Through a trusting relationship built over time, the project officers understood that focusing directly and solely on combating malnutrition would stigmatise the parents’ inability and increase their feeling of failure. A pre-school was opened instead, in view of the community’s aspiration for the children’s education and its ability to mobilise itself for this purpose. A nutrition programme included in the pre-school programme enabled the parents to involve themselves in following the overall development of their children. Most important, it sent a strong message to the parents that, together with others, they were capable of meeting their children’s health and nutrition needs.[16]

Time and mutual trust stand out as enabling factors for partnership. The choice to start the pre-school with these families as an appropriate approach was the result of a commitment of more than five years. Such a lasting commitment was necessary to build a relationship of trust and to really understand the aspirations of the families. 

Anyone involved in partnership with the poorest needs to have confidence in the value of the knowledge that the poor can bring and in the possibility that their aspirations will be made into reality. People living in poverty need opportunities to build up confidence - confidence in their right to hold views, to articulate their thoughts, to have a voice, and to overcome fear or hostility towards those in power. They need to know that they are really being listened to and that their contributions are valued. 

By contrast, speeding up an approach in order to implement a solution more rapidly is an obstacle to the long-term partnership goal. The experience of social workers in one municipality of Burkina Faso is enlightening in this regard. Working with children in outreach projects, they put emphasis on taking into account the rhythm of the children to ensure their effective reintegration into the family : 

 

"We are convinced that building trust and confidence is a prerequisite if we want to avoid requests for material help. But we are under pressure of implementing in six months’ time direct interventions to be in accordance with the funding agency’s planning. The donor agencies need to justify that they have spent money. This approach does not always favour discreet work in the shadows and long-term commitment. Long-lasting action requires five or six years before any impact can be gauged." [17]

 

c. Strengthening the family unit

The experience gathered from working side-by-side with very poor families shows that, from their viewpoint, development should uplift the well-being of the whole family. The sense of family ties is very strong among underprivileged populations. The family, whatever its model, is the last stronghold against social exclusion. A mother in the United States shared her thoughts in a testimonial[18] : 

 

"Poverty can destroy families. But in times of deep trouble, the family is a source of strength. The poor strive to keep their families together even more than other people, because that’s their last hope. No matter how poor you are, as long as you have each other to hold onto, you still have that strength. But once your family is taken away, you just give up. Maybe you don’t know where you’re going to find your next meal. But as long as there’s hope, you have to go out and try again. I see this a lot in poor families - generations stand by one another, no matter what."

 

Especially in projects geared towards children, it is crucial to find ways to support, rather than to supplant, the efforts of the parents. Five organisations, both public and non-governmental, working with children living in the streets in Burkina Faso have gathered together to share their experience. They made reintegration of the children into the family, nuclear or extended, the ultimate goal of their projects. Therefore, with the agreement of the child, they direct their priority towards finding the family or someone in touch with the parents before any action with the child is envisaged. Their findings are interesting in this regard. Parents have made efforts for their children, and have had expectations for them. They legitimately feel frustrated and hurt by the children’s difficult situation. Their efforts as parents need to be recognised and valued. A development worker wrote : "Through several visits to the family of a child who had fled his home and arrived recently in our training centre, I discovered what the father had undertaken - enrolling him in school, paying for his courses in mechanics and his apprenticeship in building. Noting all these efforts, although not always successful, one cannot say that the parents have given up their responsibilities."[19]. Acknowledging the parental efforts and recognising them in front of the child is of utmost importance to the child’s personal development. 

Similarly, what a child can achieve must be valued and become a source of pride for the family. For instance, a father was very moved when his child had finished his stay at the training centre and came back home as initially promised : "My son had done bad things, and I had had enough. Now that you told me what he was capable of and that you believe he can change, I am ready to help you." A project run for the children cannot substitute for the parents’ role but, on the contrary, must be accountable to the parents. 

Whatever the geographical context, in-depth knowledge of the reality of the poorest families shows how necessary that knowledge is to strengthening the family unit. The following finding helps get an insight into what tends to be overlooked : "People often speak of single mothers, but there is another reality. I observed the journeys of poor women and their children. They travel on chartered buses, at great expense, often for five or more hours to reach distant prisons where their fathers, husbands, or sons are. Why do these women invest so much time and patience ? Because despite how outsiders might consider them, and despite the long separations, these women consider their family to include a man, even if the only chance to live that unity right now is in a noisy, crowded visiting room. On those visits, I don’t see single mothers or prison inmates. I see families. Answers to deep poverty must begin with recognising the way people see their own families."[20]

 

The advancement of women and the right to live as a family   Ms. Elizabeth Laboy’s husband was working full-time in a plastics factory for minimum wage, in order to support her and their six children. Because they could not afford market-value rent, they had been living in a shelter in North America, with the rent on a sliding scale. This government-funded shelter required the husband to appear at an appointment for workfare, which he missed. This missed appointment, combined with incomplete paperwork, led the shelter to order that he no longer live there. For Ms. Laboy and the children to be allowed to remain, she was required to sign a contract promising not to let him on the premises. Her husband then spent weeks sleeping in a car. Sometimes Ms. Laboy violated the contract by allowing him to visit his family, and to sleep in the closet of the shelter apartment. « Once, their 13-year-old daughter, Xiomarah, recalled, caseworkers dropped by unannounced while he was asleep in the closet, and she feared they would find him. » [21] Next, the whole family was ordered to leave the shelter because they owed rent money. Together with the father, the family became homeless, sleeping on the floor of a building superintendent’s tool room, then in a friend’s apartment and in a church. Finally, the local government paid for the family to leave the state. The father had to leave his job, and the family is now sleeping on the floor in the one-bedroom apartment of relatives. This is far from being an isolated situation. In many countries, conditions of abject poverty make it excruciatingly hard and sometimes impossible for very poor families to stay together. A mother speaks of being homeless in Asia :  « My family has been on the street for three years now. The last place we had was not really a house and flooded when it rained. The owners wanted it back, and we were thrown into the streets again. I have three children living with me. Two of my children died when they were little, one of pneumonia and one of malaria. I have given away two other daughters - Rita who is 9 is working as domestic servant, and I gave away my youngest to be adopted. I was afraid of what might happen if they grew up in the streets. Young girls are dragged away, all because they are poor. … Police harass us for sleeping on the street. But what can we do ? They come in the early hours, pile us into a truck and send us to camps. They are worse than regular prisons. They split up the families. A father and mother are not put together. How can they do that ? They split us up - it’s like breaking a bird’s nest. Don’t they see that ? All we have is our family. I can’t read or write, but I understand that much - what they do to us is an injustice. »[22] Given the dual challenge of being poor and being a woman, it is right and just that more and more development efforts focus specifically on women and girls. But we must be wary of the attitude that the role of men in the lives of their families is somehow less important. For the focus on the advancement of women to be most fully effective, it must include support for women to hold their families together, including living with the men with whom they choose to share their lives.  The condition of women and girls around the world is slowly progressing, thanks to achievements such as the commitments made at the Beijing World Conference on the Status of Women in 1995. As the international community continues to invest efforts in implementing these commitments, it is our collective responsibility to make sure that women like these mothers from North America and Asia are able to contribute to articulating our common goals. They have a crucial role to play in shaping policies to ensure that poverty does not tear apart their families.  As long as the poorest women remain without hope of keeping their families together in dignity, none of our achievements by and for women can be secure.

 

d. Building on existing solidarity

The risk exists that an immediate outside intervention may break the informal support network already active around the poorest. It is important to seek out individuals or small groups who are already supporting the very poor. These people may be hidden by their own discretion. It may be a tailor who saves scraps of material to offer children living in the street who need to mend their clothes, or a family who will always look for a way to take in homeless people. In every community, there are people like this. It is important to nurture the existing relationships of mutual solidarity and build on them. If care is not taken, larger development projects may make these small efforts meaningless.

The village of Sanankoroba in Mali shows how a mixture of local organization and modern equipment can have good and lasting results. The Sanankoroba villagers started more than ten years ago an irrigation and farming project through a twinning agreement with the Canadian town of St. Elizabeth. Instead of foreigners making the decisions, the villagers used their own methods. Public meetings were held and the tribal authority, the council of the elders, was consulted first. The council decided to extend the decision-making process to other age groups. This created links to different tribes and to associations of women, young people, and professionals. The council then gave its opinion and decided how the project should be carried out. The 24-member committee that was set up contained two new elements - it had five women on it and a local farm labourer as its chairperson, despite the participation of people who had been trained in industrialised countries. This break with the classic pattern of development aid shows a determination to respect local knowledge. Also, rather than taking the name suggested for the project by Canadian development workers - "Des mains pour demain" or "Hands for the Future" - the villagers chose a name closer to their way of thinking, "Benkadi" or "good understanding". This name stressed that the project’s goal is unity and social cohesion, rather than transformation and planning, as conveyed by the Canadian name.[23] 

 

e. Shaping in-depth knowledge with the poorest

 

Involving the poorest as partners means seeking to know the overall community of which they are members, for example by living in the same neighbourhood, by sharing in local activities, and by building respect for one another. The knowledge gained in this way does not involve a scientific investigation or data collection about a target group. It is the process through which all partners - the poorest as well as the other participants (development workers, field officers, volunteers, local officers, etc.) - contribute to mutual understanding and enhance their partnership.

Reciprocity in understanding is a key to success in development. A development worker in Burkina Faso emphasises the fact that the population involved has the right to know explicitly the role of the other partners[24] : "We must be very clear with the parents about our role as facilitators in renewing family ties. Otherwise they may think that we are employers of their children or their sponsors."

Partnership is possible only if each partner is convinced of the importance of the reciprocal sharing of knowledge and agrees to move from his/her initial position. If some conditions to partnership seem obvious - listening to the poorest, building their confidence - they are not sufficient. A woman involved in a project in rural France cautioned, "Listening is not the same as understanding. For me, we can understand each other when we can contemplate doing something together." Listening is not a passive attitude. The ethic of « doing together, learning together » implies a discreet and demanding companionship to support the poorest families in their efforts to live up to their expectations and commitments. It can develop only when each person learns something from the others, and is proud of his or her own efforts and input.

In Manila, the ATD Fourth World Street Library programme is a catalyst for this reciprocal knowledge. Books are read regularly with very poor children outdoors, wherever they live, and creative projects are done. By design, the programme is not run by full-time staff only. It is an opportunity to open up to a broader environment. Some university students have chosen this project for their social immersion period, learning from the community and contributing their talents in storytelling and artwork. In their evaluation, these students acknowledged that such an immersion experience shed a different light on the prevailing prejudices about the so-called idleness and laziness of the « urban poor » and helped them understand the life and the resilience of very poor families. 

 

"I saw the aspirations of these families and the efforts they made to live in dignity. I had heard before about the ‘squatter areas’, the ‘urban poor’, through statistics, and I was afraid to be in contact with those people. Now I have been able to meet Aldo, Jessica, Leo and other children - not just the label ‘street children.’ I discovered that they are children, with their dreams and hopes, just like all other children. I saw how much they liked books, how much they enjoyed reading and listening to stories. They taught me a lot."

 

Sharing of knowledge is another factor conducive to partnership. It makes it possible to create new avenues for action. A working group in Canada[25] of professionals from different fields (social services, community development, literacy programmes, churches, shelters for homeless people) gathers with very poor people to speak about each other’s experiences. Through these meetings, the experience, thinking and know-how of the poorest trains participants to understand the rationale of the attitudes and choices of the poorest, going beyond their apparently inconsistent actions. When asked what she learned from the group, a health worker explained, "At the hospital, there is no opportunity to talk about poverty. We’re always in a situation of crisis and emergency. I am caught between defending people’s rights, and the demands of the organisation. I can’t change anything by myself. This group gives me the support to see possibilities for change."

 

f. The poorest renewing creativity and cultural achievement

 

It is largely recognised that, for the accomplishment of human beings in all fields of human activity, culture and creativity enjoy a privileged status. However, most of the time, if not always, very poor people are excluded from the spheres of culture and creativity, in the sense that their situation deprives them of opportunities to reveal their creative potential and to be partners in potential cultural creations, be it in painting, theatre, poetry, music, etc. Creativity, including artistic activity, is common to all humankind. Bringing culture, creativity, and art into areas of extreme deprivation does not mean that all will or should become great artists. But it means creating an indispensable environment where the treasures of original creativity that lie uncovered could emerge and enrich humankind. 

Through varied and extensive experiences, ATD Fourth World together with other NGOs[26] can affirm today that the ambition of partnership with the poorest means building bridges between the world of art and the world of the very poor, who are completely cut off from the noblest forms of art. For is it not art in its noblest sense, that gives to humankind its full plenitude ? Recognising the right of all - and allowing access by all - to artistic creativity, is the best way out of the temptation to patronize the poor, even when this patronizing is in the name of partnership. (See box.)

"Painting and drawing allow us to express what we feel - our joy, our concerns. In those moments of quietness and harmony, we feel we are experiencing the friendship and understanding we have always longed for." [27] The poorest constantly remind us that human beings thirst for beauty and creative expression as much as they require food, clothing, and shelter. In Bangkok, a Fourth World Art and Poetry[28] workshop was set up inside a shantytown as a path toward cultural development. Very poor adults and young people who participate in painting sessions there find an opportunity to reveal to themselves, and to communicate to people from other backgrounds, their most cherished thoughts and values. An exhibition of their work, entitled « Blue Buffalos in the Sky » and held in a Bangkok art gallery, showcased the innovation that can result from partnership - between very poor communities, NGOs, an international organisation such as Unesco, the artistic community, a university of fine arts and the public at large - when all concerned share the ambition of offering one another the best of their creativity.

In many disadvantaged areas around the world, ATD Fourth World runs Street Library programmes in response to the desire to learn shown by underprivileged children - especially among those who have the least access to school - and to their parents’ concern for their future. In areas severely marked by poverty in New York City, in Guatemala City, and in Manila, volunteers come regularly to sit with children on the roadside or in a vacant lot in order to read books and to do creative activities such as painting, woodwork, photography and so on. The children’s parents are rarely involved in community organizations. The Street Library tries to establish links with the wider community by inviting artists and others with specific skills to share their talents and knowledge with the children. Teachers, librarians, police officers, and local officials are also invited to develop relationships with these children by discovering their potential. On these occasions, the poorest are recognised as people capable of investing in their children’s future and of contributing to the neighbourhood. 

Parents of children who participate in the street library meet regularly to discuss issues of special concern to them, and share their views and hopes for their families. Through this process, they realise that their experience is a source of strength for themselves and of solidarity for others. This prepares them to meet with community organisers or local officials. In this respect, the Street Library is a comprehensive community project, which leads toward empowerment. 

 

Cinema as a transforming experience A recent film-making project in the Netherlands showed what can be done when the poorest are associated as partners in crafting a work of great art. Because the film depicted the deepest human suffering, the men from very poor backgrounds who acted in it took on a two-fold responsibility : first toward their own people, who share their experience of exclusion and extreme deprivation ; and second toward awakening the rest of the world to their experience of hitting rock-bottom and to the power of their hope. These men, workers who are often without employment, worked alongside professional actors with the support of the whole film crew. This opened the extraordinary possibility of entering a working environment of rigour and professionalism as well as that of a vocation in the world of art. The professional crew also gained in the experience. Seeking partnership with the poorest allowed them glimpses into the profound depth of humankind.  When considering guidelines towards partnership with the poorest, art and culture deserve special attention. Experience has shown that the very poor gain in strength and open themselves for other important responsibilities when they are invited to be part of ambitious project and when they enter into a relation of real partnership with skilled people. This is particularly true for very excluded men who, in Western Europe, are generally considered the most difficult to mobilise. Art and culture become whole when they dare to portray the suffering and the hopes of the most miserable.  Source : ATD Fourth World

 

1.2. Guidelines drawn from experience

 

The experiences of partnership described previously show that building partnership with the poorest does not mean developing separate programmes to target them, as this would stigmatize them even further. The goal is rather to start and design projects with those least likely to be included in any development initiatives, to ensure a much greater chance of creating a project that will reach all, and be of use to all. 

 

a. Conditions for partnership with the poorest

Attaining a comprehensive and sustainable partnership implies several conditions.

 

Investing the time needed

Partnership relies very much on an investment of time. One must accept being apparently inefficient for some time by taking time to meet the poorest without a finalised project, in order to plan the project with them. It takes time to know their lives, their interests, their aspirations ; and also to introduce oneself to them, to allow them to know one’s daily life and one’s convictions. Listening to the poorest also implies taking a risk on something that is apparently unfeasible. It means progressing at the pace of the weakest.

 

Trust and confidence

 

As implied in the previous point, this time is essential to building mutual trust and confidence. All the partners involved in a project with the poorest need to have confidence in the value of the knowledge they can bring and in the possibility of their aspirations becoming reality. People living in poverty need opportunities to build up confidence - confidence in articulating their thoughts and views, in defending their right to hold views and to have a voice, and in overcoming fear or hostility toward those in power. They need to know that they are really being listened to and that their contributions are valued.

 

Commitment to working with one another 

 

For partnership to be possible, all partners need to realise how complementary each one is to the others and to accept that they - and the others - be influenced by one another. This approach of working and thinking together is effective in programmes and projects where each participant can acquire specific knowledge or know-how and can be proud of his or her efforts and contributions. This long-lasting commitment alongside the poorest is needed to ensure that any representative role they take on will involve a real contribution.

 

Reciprocal training

 

All partners need training. The poorest specifically need the tools to be able to analyse their rights, and to take on responsibilities. Care must be taken not to rely on the most dynamic participants in such a way that their success might humiliate others. Training of project workers is also essential, and must be based on the knowledge gained from the poorest. Technical knowledge must be supplemented with skills in building personal relationships. 

 

Consensus building and broad-based participation 

 

Priority given to the most excluded does not mean exclusivity. Efforts by the poorest to overcome their condition are not sustainable if they are not noticed and backed by other segments of society. It is therefore important that uplifting the poorest be integrated into the common concerns of the whole community and that partnership with them be determined at the start of a project. Equally important are involving the poorest in specific events of their countries and valuing their contribution to overall social development. These opportunities can be an international or national campaign, an artistic or sporting event, or a neighbourhood festival. Finally, cross-sectoral co-operation between civil society organisations is a key factor to a continuing partnership with the poorest.

 

 

b. Obstacles to partnership

Although participation and empowerment have become part of the vocabulary of development, the poorest are often excluded from participating in decision-making. Their representative role is often a token one and is not considered as a source of creation. 

There is also evidence of original programmes that were developed thanks to the inventiveness and creativity of very poor people ; and then when these programmes are extended to a wider public, they can actually end up excluding the people who were at the origins of their design. These examples are a disincentive to the poorest people becoming partners in subsequent cooperation.

Specific measures designed to improve the situation of people living in poverty can be counter-productive if they are not part of a comprehensive policy. They can be an obstacle to partnership with the poorest when they « cream off » the most dynamic and articulate participants, who move on and leave their community behind.

The most frequent shortcomings of development projects are the tight limitations on time, and conditions for funding that do not correspond to the priorities of the poorest. The pressure for short-term results is an obstacle to reaching the poorest, because it does not take account of the time and human resources necessary to build an in-depth knowledge of the poorest and to forge a partnership with them.

Another hindrance to partnership with the poorest is that they are rarely involved in project evaluation. Furthermore, project assessment weighs too heavily on quantitative information ; when qualitative indicators are introduced, they need to go further to include questioning about the individuals still not reached.

 

1.3. Indicators of success for partnership with the poorest 

The impact of this partnership can be assessed by tracing the changes effected in the lives of the poorest and in the response of the other partners. Success for the poorest is indicated by movement out of poverty, their growing involvement with society and their steps towards contributing to society. Success of the other partners is reflected by their increasing responsiveness to the suffering, hopes, and daily struggles of the poorest. 

Success is defined here by accomplishments, or distinct changes over time, in the lives of the poorest. These have been derived from evidence gathered, particularly through written reports at different phases of a project, which allow us to formulate certain indicators by comparing the lives of the individuals and families as they evolve during the project. [29]

 

Becoming less isolated

 

One indicator of success relates to isolation. Over generations of deep poverty, the poorest internalise their exclusion by others. For instance, they do not dare attend a parents’ meeting at school because of their illiteracy. When this situation is acknowledged as a reality that is shared, rather than as individual, the same people stop living the lives of forgotten people on the fringe of society. Their self-esteem is strengthened. When this happens, they see themselves and are seen by others in a different light. Their fortitude begins to be recognised. Their sense of inferiority can give way to a sense of pride in themselves and their achievements, which in turn leads them to break out of their isolation. 

 

"We are people of perseverance. Tell everybody they must not give up the fight. Tell them we want to be in contact with them throughout the world. Because when you realize that you are among many who are moving forward together, you keep your courage in order to encourage others."[30] 

 

The above message came from people who used to live in the streets in the outskirts of Poznan, Poland. Things changed for them on the day that a university professor and his family, convinced of their values and their determination to break free of destitution, decided to involve them in building a small housing estate and to live there with them. Today, they take part together in running a hostel that offers respite stays for very poor people.

Part of breaking out of isolation or near-isolation involves building more lasting and constructive contacts with others : neighbours, other families or organisations. An essential feature of these contacts should be that the very poor do not only serve others but are also seen and see themselves as being able to contribute to the world. One example of this indicator of empowerment is the gatherings of people of different backgrounds who come together to listen to testimonies from very poor people, and renew their common commitment to the struggle against poverty. In Manila, poor families have chosen as a venue for these meetings the Commemorative Stone in Honour of the Victims of Extreme Poverty, laid in Rizal Park. This is what a mother said of these meetings : 

 

"We meet each other at the Commemorative Stone to stop poverty. It’s like this for poor folks : sometimes we eat, sometimes we don’t. I said : Let’s go there to the stone, we are all equal there, we are all poor, we don’t have to be ashamed. We strengthen ourselves to face others. Sometimes we meet there with people from other countries. We have the chance to mix with them, be happy together, listen to their messages and tell them about the situation here. (…) However difficult our life is for us, we do not give up hope !" [31]

 

Being able to contribute and receive

Very poor families are burdened with a long history of failure and humiliation. They are seen by society as asking for help and charity. This perception affects the way in which they come to see themselves. Liberation from this condition marks success. It is important for a community to see what the poorest have to contribute. In this way, all community members can learn from one another, and each can perceive the other differently. They come to know what to expect and what to require. A new cycle of giving and taking has started, as shown in the following examples. 

Michelle is a youth who participates in Clubs of Knowledge and Solidarity aimed at building friendship and mutual understanding between young people from very poor families and youths from other backgrounds. At one club meeting, she said : 

 

"Before, I did not want to go to these meetings. There were two categories, and I was always with those labelled ‘delinquents.’ It was very hard. When these meetings first started, I and the others with ‘bad’ reputations were horrible toward the college students. We wanted to test them. They did come back, however, proving that they had some interest in us…. Since then, everyone has learned how to react within the group, to appreciate our differences, to cope with our fears and doubts."

 

The poorest know that they need others. They do not say : "We don’t want to be helped." They say instead : "We need help but not just any kind of help." They expect support that respects their sense of dignity without making them dependent. 

 

"I have decided to go out and talk to people," a woman in Madagascar said to a project worker. "Before, I went out only to fetch water at the pump. But I realise that if I stay between four walls, I see only problems. You have been visiting me at my home for a long time, and I only come to your place now. I look for my rights and I want to work at your side. Now, I can help others - accompanying a neighbour to the hospital or going to buy medicine for her at the pharmacy."[32]

 

Building on past struggles

Having to invest their energy in daily struggles, the poorest have few opportunities to gauge their efforts and to plan their future. When their resilience is recognised and valued by other people, it can have a powerful chain reaction. The poorest start to plan for the future ; they think of ways to earn their livelihood ; they celebrate festivities, either on their own or with others. It is important to share with the poorest what has been learned from them, highlighting the achievements made by them or their kin. Thus, they can review their past, talk about it, and use it to envisage new perspectives. Their past can even become useful during trying times as an assurance of their ability to overcome hardship. 

The poorest help us to understand the importance of acknowledging what has been discovered with them or thanks to them. Recognising the victories of their own struggle, however modest, sheds a positive light on their personal history. It is equally important to show children the strength of their parents so that they are proud of their family.

 

Emerging talents

As long as they are excluded, people are unable to express their latent talents. Artistic activities provide another type of encounter, where they can unleash their talents. As they are recognised and valued on an equal footing, they find opportunities to express their artistic, intellectual, and interpersonal skills, both individually and collectively. 

Two participants in the workshops at the ATD Fourth World House of Knowledge in Belgium shared the experience of unleashing their creativity. A young man said, "When I draw, when I paint, it is like a tenderness flows from me. I no longer have any need to talk of my troubles, or to shout in order to exist. By painting and drawing, we create a new image of ourselves, one we can be proud of. » A young mother echoed his thoughts, "I have always written poems. I was already making poems in school, but no one looked at them. They were not put in a book as they are here. And with this book, they will go out into the world. Using computers made me discover my poems in another way. […] After the poems, I want to do many other things."[33]

 

Gaining knowledge and speaking out 

The poorest are deprived of access to knowledge. In light of their past experience, they rarely believe that they can learn and understand how society functions. When they feel able and ready to formulate what they think and take the step of speaking out in public, this is a success and a sign of the great distance they have travelled.

The recent adoption of the Law Against Social Exclusion in France best illustrates the successful partnership with the poorest. They made a point of giving a voice, directly and indirectly, to their concerns and viewpoints throughout this drawn-out legislative process. They participated in a vast survey to evaluate public policies designed to combat poverty ; and they met subsequently to discuss the draft bill and react to draft provisions regarding education, vocational training and job opportunities. The most important lesson from this experience was that the poorest showed they are eager and able to take part in policy-making as partners in their own right. 

 

When the very poor show how to reach out to others

 

Strong evidence of their emergence of the poorest people from poverty can be seen in the way they stand up against manifestations of exclusion. With new-found confidence in themselves and others, they put into practice the sense of responsibility they nurture for those worse-off than themselves. For example, in the Street Library in Manila, the older boys and girls took more and more initiatives to support other children. A local teenager, who had been coming to the Street Library for seven years, decided to share what he enjoyed, and he started to organise reading sessions with children elsewhere in the neighbourhood. (See box.)

 

"Not only for myself, but for the children around me…"   Throughout the year, two young people, Fernando (19 years old) and Lizel (22 years old) helped and encouraged children who, like them, live with their families in a cemetery. Fernando told us what the Festival of Learning[34] meant to him and the children : "When the Street Library started at my place, I was only 9 years old. At that time, I thought it was only books and more books. But later on I realised it is a way of helping a child to be a good citizen." Today, Fernando loves telling children stories, sharing what he has learnt with others. He has taken the initiative to start up a street library in two new places in the cemetery.  "The Festival of Learning helps a child to show his talents, even though others think he cannot do it. The children feel there is no discrimination -  even though your clothes may be dirty, you can still participate. The reason a child loses interest in studying is because of family problems. I witness this among the children I know…. The Festival of Learning is also a way for children to teach what they themselves have learnt : how to tell a story to their brothers and sisters. I have learnt that the Festival of Learning is an opportunity for children to be part of society," he said. Lizel has taken on a lot of responsibility in the last year in running the Street Library. Like Fernando, her involvement convinced her to take up studying again in order to become a teacher. "ATD Fourth World has been running a Street Library in my place for a long time. But I was very shy before and didn’t dare join in. I didn’t really want to be with other people from the cemetery. When I was invited to join the Festival of Learning last year, I got interested because of the painting exhibitions I went to see. Afterwards, I thought it should not be only for myself, but also for the children around me, those younger than me. The Street Library is a way of not closing my door to the children in my neighbourhood. Now, I’m happy. I know other children from other places in the cemetery. They consider me as their older sister." Source : ATD Fourth World, Philippines

 

1.4. A meeting of the minds : 

Universities and the very poor building a knowledge base together

A number of projects have been carried out to get the poor themselves involved as partners in the development of knowledge about poverty. At the University of Cuzco, Peru, for instance, in 1976 a professor of anthropology, often with his colleagues and students, began extensive visits to learn from the farm workers in small rural communities of the steep mountainous regions of Calca, where hunger is a constant threat. The goal of his project was to develop a process whereby farm workers and academics would become researchers together, in order to analyse the socio-economic situation and to define a method that could be used in other development projects. After a period of eleven years with the communities in question - and after adding a specific focus on extreme poverty - this professor came to realise that in communities where everyone is poor, some not only are poorer than others, but also are pushed to the fringes and excluded from discussions concerning the community’s future. Some of the farm workers involved in the research went on to become decision-makers in their communities.[35]

The Fourth World Open University is an initiative founded specifically to provide regular forums for adults living in chronic poverty to share their life experiences and thinking with people from other backgrounds with the aim of fostering mutual understanding and respect. This Open University has been run for 25 years now in several places in Europe and Asia. Behind its goal lies the assumption that the firsthand knowledge of people experiencing and resisting poverty ought to be acknowledged and valued. In this dialogue, the knowledge and experience of every participant are enriched by those of others, poor and non-poor alike. 

One of the most recent projects of the Fourth World Open University was a partnership aimed at introducing the knowledge of people living in poverty into an academic environment. (See box.)

This pilot project, called « A Meeting of the Minds, » brought together : people with direct and long-term experience of poverty who were actively involved in poverty eradication ; academics in the fields of history, law, physics, psychology and sociology ; and ATD Fourth World Volunteer Corps members. The three groups of participants contributed different perspectives on poverty and offered different skills to the overall research. Everyone was given equal status ; their varied sources of knowledge were recognised as equally valuable, as all the participants collaborated in writing a book about the results. Those conditions allowed a climate of mutual trust, conducive to genuine partnership. Another criterion for success was the search for a common language and methods of communication that facilitated the exchange of individual experiences.

 

"A Meeting of the Minds"   §  Introducing the knowledge of people living in poverty into an academic environment In 1983, in a lecture at the Sorbonne University in Paris, Fr. Joseph Wresinski, founder of ATD Fourth World, called on the academic world to « ensure that the thoughts and reflections of the poorest are validated. Without you their validity is constantly challenged and denied ; nobody listens to the poorest. Instead we impose outside interpretations on them that prevent them from reflecting on their own life. »  Out of this challenge grew the experimental programme "A Meeting of the Minds," carried out from 1996 to 1998. It aimed at learning in a new way, by cross fertilising three sources of knowledge. People with long-term experience of poverty and actively involved in poverty eradication brought in a knowledge and thinking stemming from their experience of and resistance to chronic poverty. ATD Fourth World Volunteer Corps members offered their experience of action with the poorest and of fostering change together. Academics brought their scientific approach and knowledge.  §  Partnership towards more egalitarian and inclusive academic research A research team consisted of 15 people with direct experience of poverty, 12 professors and research workers belonging to nine universities in France and Belgium, and five ATD Fourth World core-volunteers. During the programme, participants from the three groups split into smaller working teams of 6 or 7, each team looking more deeply into one of the five subjects chosen as being of particular relevance to poverty.  A pedagogical team provided the research team with methodological and pedagogical support, and a scientific advisory committee ensured the validity of the pedagogical approach and assessed the quality of the research results.  §  Being authors and researchers together Five collective theses were written covering the chosen topics. History : Story of the transition from the shame of chronic poverty to the pride of belonging to a people. Family : Founding a family and being oriented with respect to time. Knowledge : Skills for freedom : life, education, action. Work and Human Activity : How are the skills of the poorest contributing to societies of tomorrow ? How could they gain recognition ? Political participation : How are the poor represented ? An issue for democracy.  These theses were published in Meeting of the Minds - When the Fourth World and academia think together.* An evaluation analysing the approach and giving conclusions of the programme was also written. §  What did the academics think of the partnership ? "[The project] forced us to question ourselves, as professors, as citizens, as human beings. It brought more than simply a knowledge of poverty ; it taught us another way of working as academics." "The project has shown me that academia must widen its perspective ; we must add another dimension to our experience to complement our objectivity. Above all, we must understand people’s capacity to understand. We must cultivate these pieces of knowledge." "Partnership implies that we evolve at the pace of the slowest, at every phase of the programme."    *Source : Le croisement des savoirs : quand le Quart Monde et l’Université pensent ensemble, Editions de l’Atelier et Editions Quart Monde, 1999

 

1.5. The partnership of the poorest guarantees full citizenship for all

To recognise the unique contribution of the very poor to building a more equitable society, we must begin by creating the equal footing necessary for any genuine partnership with the rest of society. As highlighted throughout Part One of this paper, there are conditions necessary for this partnership to take root and for institutions and ways of thinking to change in order to make a place for the poorest. Until all of our fellow citizens are empowered, the world is deprived of their contribution. But it is not easy to « empower » people whose families have been mired in deep poverty for generations.

Individuals, families and communities living in extreme poverty have never ceased to fight for their dignity and their survival. In the midst of their search for livelihood, they deploy all efforts to help preserve family links and guarantee the future of the children. Their gestures of resilience and courage too often go unnoticed - like those of mothers who resort to begging to gather the amount due for school fees and school supplies, illustrating dramatically their aspiration for a better future for their children, "so that they will not undergo what we have experienced ourselves," as they often say.[36]  In the face of adversity and misfortune, people develop a keen sense of mutual aid, assisting others in the same situation or offering shelter to people worse-off than themselves.

Out of their struggle and resilience, the poorest acquire invaluable knowledge and thinking. Their exclusion represents a waste of human resources and a breach of social cohesion. Experience shows that they have the desire and ability to participate in decisions about policies and projects that affect their lives. They must be "the driving force of the coalition for poverty eradication [because they] have the strongest motivation and the greatest stake in the outcome."[37]

Experience of exclusion endured by people living in poverty highlights the shortfall of our societies in promoting effective exercise of fundamental rights. They have no way to exercise the rights that are recognised in the Conventions and Charters signed by the Member States and to which their fellow-citizens have access, such as the right to housing, the right to health care, the right to education, the right to community life. The more destitute people are, the more they lose the possibility of exercising their civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. These situations clearly show how indivisible and interdependent rights are in daily life, and how poverty is a denial of the effective exercise of human rights. 

In this perspective, building partnership with the poorest is a stepping stone toward the achievement of a human-centered world where "All human beings are born free and remain equal in dignity and rights." (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1)

 

"Partnership is essential for the development of the population as a whole ; yet the poorest people rarely have the chance to experience such an association with others. The participation of the poorest depends largely on the will of political and social leaders to involve them. When leaders make the effort to inform the most disadvantaged people, solicit their views and show that they are taken into account, then the poorest will be able to exercise full citizenship, be recognised as having rights and responsibilities and be helped to assume them."[38]

 

 

 

PART TWO : REDEFINING WORK AND HUMAN ACTIVITY

TO ENHANCE SOCIAL INTEGRATION

 

At the Copenhagen Summit, the Governments affirmed that their commitments to eradicate poverty and to promote full employment and social integration are interrelated and essential for achieving a social development contributed to by all and benefiting all. Fulfilling the Copenhagen commitments requires, at all levels, the involvement and the active partnership of all parties concerned. A key determinant of this fulfilment is the partnership to be built, in a reciprocal process, between the poorest and all other members of the societies in which they live.

But partnership for what purpose ? Those living in extreme poverty show how they are prevented from assuming their responsibilities, "exercising their rights and utilising their resources."[39] Lack of decent housing can lead to poor health, which in turn prevents people from staying in a job ; illiteracy and lack of access to culture act as barriers to vocational training and participation in the community ; being unemployed lessens the chances of gaining access to decent housing.

The condemnation of the poorest to this cycle raises the fundamental question : What environment will enable them to enjoy basic security and, at the same time, attain economic autonomy and fully participate in their community and in society ? This question is echoed in Commitment 3 of the Copenhagen Summit.

 

"We commit ourselves to promoting the goal of full employment as a basic priority of our economic and social policies, and to enabling all men and women to attain secure and sustainable livelihoods through freely chosen, productive employment and work."

 

However, the promotion of full employment also requires a multi-faceted strategy. Issues such as employment, job creation and training cannot be addressed independently of all other aspects of human development. Work and training should encompass education, access to cultural and creative activities, family life, one’s place in society and community life, spiritual life, and meaningful participation in public and political life.

 

Part Two of this paper is based on the interdependence of the right to economic participation and the right to social and cultural participation. In this part, we will propose a redefinition of human rights-based development so as to enhance social integration. Rethinking human development in this perspective implies taking on a three-fold challenge : 

§  To strive for access to decent work for all in the labour market so that each person can contribute meaningfully to the labour force in conditions of dignity ; 

§ To create opportunities for everyone to be creative and useful in periods when they are not in the labour market ;

§  To promote a harmonious distribution in everyone’s life between time spent inside and outside the labour market.

 

The first section of this part will address the right of the poorest people to freely chosen productive work and employment. The second part will bring to the fore various experiences of social and cultural development that involve very poor people in fields of human activity other than productive employment. The third part will elaborate ways to attain, in the course of a lifetime, a harmonious distribution of time between all the fields of work and other activities, with a view to enhancing social integration and fostering vibrant societal participation.

 

2.1 The right of the poorest to freely chosen productive work and employment

For the poorest to be able to choose productive work freely, society faces the challenge of making a profound change in economic life and the employment environment. This change should address all sectors of work, remunerated formal jobs and informal work alike, as well as what the Programme of Action called "other forms of atypical employment." As a basis for action toward full employment, the Programme of Action of the Copenhagen Summit Declaration stressed that "productive work and employment are central elements of development as well as decisive elements of human identity." It also affirmed that "adequately and appropriately remunerated employment is an effective method of combating poverty and promoting social integration."

 

 

a. The quest of the poorest for economic autonomy and personal and social identity

The right to work is a profound aspiration of those who are excluded from employment. As the poorest constantly express it, work not only makes it possible to secure resources but also to obtain recognition of one’s dignity, particularly in the eyes of one’s children. What is commonly called the informal labour market is based largely on the fierce desire of the poorest to work at all costs. They accept any job or themselves create opportunities in order to survive. Those who may have other means of survival, in countries with a social safety net for example, will also accept degrading and dangerous work in order to break out of their isolation and anxiety.

Young men in Senegal exhaust themselves in street vending with no assurance that they will earn any profit. They do not give up - seeking to be a guard for a village festival one day, or helping to paint a municipal fence another day. They say, "We seize any opportunity to work, and still we are seen as idle and lazy." In Peru, a man walked kilometres only to find a temporary job so far away that he could not return home for two weeks because his daily earnings did not suffice for even one bus ride. "I put all my time and energy in that job, and still I cannot afford even my children’s school supplies. That is the most unbearable thing for me." Fathers endure very hard work for a pittance, or accept being paid in kind, in order to bring home something for the family. Mothers look everywhere for some way to feed their children. Those efforts carry a meaning, a human value, that no welfare benefit would be able to convey.

The poorest people’s search for work by the poorest brings home the fact that, all over the world, they share a common thought and hope - they want to be considered as workers. This is what a man in Belgium said when he was enlisted in a training scheme after several years of unemployment : 

 

"When you are unemployed for a long time, it’s hard to get back to work. Being jobless gets on your nerves. When I have a job, I am better at home. There are also other responsibilities - a family to bring up, children who want to see their father working and are interested in what their father does. It’s important. Children give us an incentive ; when we work, we are doing it for them. At school, when my son is asked what his father does for a living, he can say his father has a job. Sometimes we are workers who have no job ; we want to be viewed as workers, even if we are unemployed."

 

From the standpoint of the poorest, freely chosen productive employment and work remain essential in providing means for economic autonomy and personal and social identity. How has their quest been supported ?

 

b. Current responses to unemployment and their impact on the poorest

Policies aimed at tackling unemployment have traditionally followed two approaches. The first approach deals with unemployment as a social problem. The second approach looks for economic solutions. 

 

Social welfare

Income redistribution through social welfare policies or social safety nets continues to be considered the typical way of attempting to establish social justice in a market economy. Increasing pressure is put on welfare benefits, however, both by the need to reduce public expenditure, and by the realisation that financial assistance is often not enough to enable people to contribute to the economy. Moreover, coercion and control associated with distribution of benefits have reached an alarming level, making it impossible for recipients to be both independent and useful to those around them. For instance, in some European countries, a public phone line was opened so that anyone can call anonymously to accuse people suspected of cheating on unemployment benefits, thus denying the poor the right to confront their accusers. "Social controller staff" is hired to track benefit earners (See box.) Social assistance designed to assist those most in need is at risk of turning into a tool to impose "forced inactivity" on unemployed workers.

 

Workers with no job… and no rights An unemployed man in a European country was summoned by the "social inspectors." They had photographed him carrying wooden planks bought at a "do-it-yourself" shop. He said he was repairing something at his mother’s home where he resided. The controllers suspected him of making furniture at home and carrying it out at night for sale. His unemployment benefits were suspended for 13 weeks. Source : Revue Quart Monde, Dossiers & Documents, No 8, Paris 1998. (Excerpt translated from French)

 

Welfare-to-work programmes and various « integration schemes »

In many industrialised countries,[40] the current thought is that all medically fit people must do some work in compensation for any welfare benefits they get. There is a positive aspect in the intention to avoid dependence and the conviction that the poor have something to contribute. The pitfall of these "workfare" programs, however, is that the jobs assigned as a condition of receiving any social benefits rarely lead to permanent employment. Furthermore, when people in workfare programs are working side-by-side with regular employees, doing the same work, they usually do not receive the same pay, and they are often treated in a manner so demeaning that it undermines any hope of integrating them into the workplace. In other cases, beneficiaries are trapped because the little income resulting from workfare programmes is deducted from the benefits they usually receive.

People’s organisations and civic groups rightly denounce these coercive measures because they impinge on dignity and individual freedom. Nevertheless, many of the poorest adults do not rush to criticise them.[41] For once, they are being offered ways to participate, and they are hopeful that they may not always be viewed as being on the receiving end. This attitude of dignity is worth noting ; it shows that the poorest expect to be involved and useful.

The present situation of the labour market is also characterised by a separate, secondary employment sector totally segregated from mainstream employment. People are recruited for short periods, and often put in stop-gap, dead-end activities. Their wages are below the standard minimum salary and they are not entitled to a regular worker status. Participation in some form of productive employment without enjoying a level of subsistence and protection according to standards within society is typically the situation of the "working poor" in the United States and of workers hired under "integration schemes" designed for the unemployed in some European countries. 

One of the most unbearable injustices in all the above mechanisms is that, in return for social welfare, human beings are tossed between busy work - sometimes as meaningless as moving piles of rocks back and forth from one side of a park to another - and periods of forced inactivity.

 

Economic solidarity

Economic solidarity comprises not-for-profit enterprises set up to offer employment and work experience to the most marginalised people.[42] They account partly for the creation of new jobs. They are run as conventional businesses, selling their products and services on the regular market. Those most likely to succeed involve partnership with local public authorities, as well as trade unions, associations and, increasingly, other private-sector enterprises. 

Nevertheless, owing to their primary focus on employment for disadvantaged individuals and groups, few of these initiatives have reached total financial self-reliance and can face the competitiveness of the market. In many countries,[43] legislative and regulatory support are required to grant these enterprises of economic solidarity a specific status and a suitable level of subsidies to achieve their aim. Workers in this sector should be given full worker status, with the associated adequate social protection and income.

 

Training 

Training plays a key role in employment policies. However, most policies regarding training have not substantially reduced unemployment. There is much room for improvement, especially concerning those people living in chronic poverty who experience long-term unemployment.

§   First, training offered to these unemployed workers rarely allows acquisition of real professional qualifications. For example, the short duration of the training schemes implemented over the last ten years in many countries of western Europe is a severe limitation. These programs do not take due account of the obstacles the most excluded workers face. Because many excluded workers have previously failed at school, they are reluctant to study mandatory courses that they have not chosen. Thus, they adapt with difficulty to the requirements of the workplace. Training schemes of longer periods have yielded better results. They allow time for remedial education, for strengthening the confidence of trainees, and for building on trainees’ specific learning abilities. 

§  Second, most of these training schemes, although originally intended for the most vulnerable members of society, have in fact benefited more skilled workers because of the highly selective recruitment procedures. 

§  Third, they do not necessarily lead to job opportunities, owing to the situation of the labour market. In this regard, recent world-wide analysis of employment noted the worrisome situation of "growth without jobs".[44]

 

Innovative training methods well tailored to the needs and learning abilities of the most excluded are being launched, but these experiences are not widely enough known.[45]

Whatever the economic situation, the enabling environment integrating underprivileged workers into employment depends on two factors. First, this integration is more likely to succeed if it is based on the conviction that all persons, whatever their qualifications, can be employable if they are trusted and supported in developing their own abilities. Second, broad-based mobilisation and strong will of all participants in the process are essential. These two points are demonstrated in the experience of Tefal, Inc., profiled below. 

 

The business sector and social integration Tefal, Inc., is a world leader in non-stick kitchenware exported to more than one hundred countries in the world. During the time span of this training program, 1989-1994, it employed 1,350 people in France. Through the program, it hired fourteen people previously considered unemployable. How did this come about and who were the people behind this experience ?  The Chief Executive Officer, who had been managing the company for twenty years, had started at 16 as an apprentice mechanic in the firm and had gone through various posts. He sums up his philosophy : "It’s the workers who are essential, not the management. The workers determine the quality of the company." The company had long supported job integration for the most excluded people through appropriate training. However, in the late 1980s, accelerated technical changes owing to fierce competition threatened to lead to downsizing part of the staff, mainly the low-skilled and particularly the illiterate.  This prospect outraged a technician, who refused to accept that technological innovation be equated with "survival of the fittest." He got the support of a union representative and of management to start a literacy programme to train those workers most in need. The foremen, despite reluctance in the beginning for fear of disruption to the work schedules, gradually admitted that it helped workers adapt to new machines and procedures and improved morale overall.  Following this impetus, the company agreed to take on 20 long-term unemployed workers referred by non-profit organisations. This represented about one percent of the total workforce. An initial training scheme was organised. The manager assessed the success rate of the 70% eventually hired : " A great part of the staff is proud of this programme. It has helped us to keep the human touch, and company morale has benefited…. The loss of production caused by these new workers in the beginning was made up for by their colleagues. The most important thing is to offer personal support to the people we are trying to integrate, both in and out of the workplace. If this is missing, we are wasting our time." The originality of this training programme lay in the refusal to prejudge the "employability" of the most deprived workers and in allowing them to prove themselves in work situations. It was also important to convince other staff members to adhere to the spirit of the programme and support the adaptation process of the new workers. Also, conventional wisdom claims that highly competitive sectors cannot afford the risk of lower productivity by employing unskilled staff. The experience of Tefal, Inc., shows that there is no proven economic basis to this assumption. Any fiscally sound company has a margin of freedom in which to promote social integration, provided that management and the workforce agree to cooperate. It is this consensus that is usually lacking, not the economic justification. Source : Xavier Godinot, Institute of Research on Human Relationships, Pierrelaye, France.

 

Development of the informal economic sector 

In developing countries, the majority of the poorest people earn their living by conducting various activities in the informal sector. Salaried work represents only about ten percent of the total labour force. Informal work is also very present in economies in transition, and even in certain industrialised countries, it remains an important resource for the survival of some of the worst off.

Unemployment, underemployment and inadequate employment are situations common to low-skilled workers of the informal sector. The latest World Employment Report[46] noted that the mechanisms preventing acquisition of appropriate qualifications are often rooted in the deprived environments and inadequate living conditions of the poor.

 

"For the low-skilled workers, [among] the factors that make it very difficult to move into better employment (…) is the poor access to training opportunities (…). The poor evaluation results [of training programmes] highlight the fact that the skills constraint is only one of the problems facing vulnerable groups of workers and that training as a single-intervention approach is likely to be insufficient to overcome exclusion." 

 

Sharing work locally Two years ago, Huadan was elected head of his village, located in the high mountains of a Southeast Asian country. Huadan, a humble and quiet man, has studied little, but his villagers recognise him for his generosity and wisdom. Not only is he concerned about the maintenance of the mountain roads around his village for which he is in charge ; he is also particularly caring toward the men in his village who feel more and more uprooted from their ancient customs and values, or who feel inferior compared with those living in the plain who have succeeded in their integration.  Huadan is also very concerned about youngsters who have left school too early, sometimes because they felt obliged to help their families. In other cases, because of great difficulties at home, they could not find the peace and stability or the determination to concentrate on their studies. Huadan knows well those discouraged men and those uprooted young people who hang out. As inactivity gnaws at their dignity, he suffers with them. Therefore, when it comes to maintaining mountain roads, he rarely calls upon professionals. The head of the village prefers to take on the job himself in order to give work to the men of his village who have difficulty finding jobs and to the youngsters who have left school. A lot of patience is needed in order to train and work with unskilled workers. Sometimes the village council pressures Huadan when the work advances too slowly. But he persists. Today, several of the young people trained by him have already succeeded in finding a well-paid job in the plain. Source : ATD Fourth World

 

Micro-finance programmes

Micro-finance programs providing small loans to poor individuals have the capacity in some cases and some regions to create new business opportunities in the informal sector. They do not, however, "constitute an alternative to the mainstream growth processes, but recognise the existence of a potential for initiating a relatively independent growth process from the activities of the poor."[47]

There is growing awareness that microcredit initiatives, despite the real opportunities they offer, are often ill-adapted to the needs and possibilities of the very poor. In research conducted in Bangladesh for the World Health Organisation, the authors note that "the vulnerability in raising crisis-coping money is much greater in the case of the poorest than for [moderate and non-poor] groups, the former being cut off from the option of soft credit mobilisation and deprived of the advantage of possessing some tangible assets."[48] Microcredit does not by itself respond to the needs and possibilities of the poorest - they cannot afford the risk of being indebted, or they cannot repay the loans because of unforeseen circumstances and emergencies.

If microcredit alone is not a sufficient solution, this is not to say that it does not offer real opportunities for people in vulnerable situations. In fact, some micro-finance institutions are linked to capacity-building and literacy training ; others offer retail outlet facilities for the products of their clients. Nevertheless, if micro-finance is to be more fully instrumental in poverty alleviation, it should be associated with appropriate mechanisms to provide the basic social services, especially education and health care, that are needed to improve the quality of life of the poorest families and communities. 

The UNDP Poverty Report 1998 states that "despite its undoubted successes, microfinance is not a magic wand for poverty reduction. The poor have long been used to taking out small loans for consumption - to tide them over a drop in income, or until a crop has been harvested (…). Supplying credit for emergencies offers some security, but it is more difficult for microcredit schemes to help poor people start significant new income-generating activities." [49]

The International Year for Microcredit scheduled for 2005 will constitute an important step for reviewing and refining microfinance initiatives based on experience.

 

c. A different perspective on human development that starts with the poorest

Because employment should enable everybody to become truly equal, independent, creative, and useful to others, it is important to strive for universal access to the labour market, so that each person can contribute meaningfully to the labour force in conditions of dignity. 

It is heartening to note that the International Labour Office has reaffirmed that its primary goal "in this period of global transition is securing decent work for women and men everywhere. (…) [It] is not just the creation of jobs, but the creation of jobs of acceptable quality. The quantity of employment cannot be divorced from its quality. (…) Decent work means productive work in which rights are protected, which generates an adequate income, with adequate social protection. It also means sufficient work in the sense that all should have full access to income-earning opportunities"[50]

Meanwhile, from the standpoint of people living in extreme poverty, ensuring respect for the right to work must be accompanied by promoting the realisation of their rights to social and cultural participation. At present, both "forced activity" and "forced inactivity" experienced by the poorest place them in a vicious circle. Lack of social and cultural participation prevents them from seizing opportunities for decent work and capacity building. Inversely, chronic unemployment reduces their resources and hampers their possibilities of participating in social and cultural life. This constitutes a waste of human resources and a hindrance to social integration.

One of the lessons learned from the poorest is that every human being strives to be useful to his or her family and community. This sheds new light on the following question : How can each person be given opportunities, throughout his or her life, to make use of times for training and for creative and useful work in all the fields in which humankind must progress ? 

 

2.2 The right for everyone to be creative and useful

In various forms, grassroots groups, NGOs and other organisations in civil society have long initiated opportunities for very poor individuals and families to meet people from other backgrounds and try their hand together at creative activities. Contrary to projects setting up services specifically for the very poor and thus maintaining them on the fringes of society, these initiatives bring to the fore the desire of the very poor to contribute to society.

Evidence of this social and political participation is found in the way that the poorest and their organisations have mobilised around the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, October 17, an officially recognised United Nations day. In many places throughout the world, they symbolically choose the 17th of every month to organize their gatherings. These are opportunities for people of diverse backgrounds to come together, meet, build friendship across social barriers, and renew a common commitment to overcoming poverty and social exclusion. On these occasions, messages of encouragement are written to similar groups - their "friends around the world" - and exchanged via the Internet. The following is an excerpt of a letter written on one such occasion by very poor parents from a rural community in Côte d’Ivoire to very poor adults in Senegal.[51]

 

"It is thanks to our children, who attend the Street Libraries, that we are now meeting on the 17th of every month.[52] At these meetings, together with the Street Library facilitators, we read testimonies, share our comments and reflections, and think of people we are in touch with. These gatherings make us move forward, they stimulate our ideas for getting out of poverty. (…)

For instance, the women of our group have discussed and decided to start a livelihood project to make soap. Thanks to a loan obtained through a group of friends, we have started learning how to make soap. We later had another training session on accounting, co-operative management. (…) We, who did not know each other before, are now united in solidarity, for the benefit of all."

 

In this example, very poor people are reaching out to develop solidarity from one country to another. In their own way, they are putting into practice the new concept of a global citizenship that focuses on the rights and responsibilities of citizens living in a global society. 

 

a. Creative social and political action

To foster exchanges between very poor people and people from other backgrounds, with the goal of learning from one another, a number of projects have been carried out by ATD Fourth World. The Fourth World Open University[53] programme is one such project. In these sessions, carried out in many countries, participants share their life experiences and develop common analyses of social situations. For people who have rarely, if ever, been told that their opinion matters to anyone, this programme includes opportunities to practice expressing their thoughts publicly. It also offers opportunities for them to dialogue with those who influence major local, national and international political issues.

One contribution made by the Fourth World Open University programme was its active participation in the process leading to the Law Against Social Exclusion, adopted in July 1998 in France. (See box.) The most important lesson from this experience was that the poorest showed that they are eager and able to take part in policy-making as partners in their own right. To ensure that the law is fully and successfully implemented however, the practice of involving people in policy-making must continue even more strongly.

 

Partnership with the poorest in crafting a law In July 1998, the national Law Against Social Exclusion was adopted by France. It was the outcome of eleven years of campaigning and policy-crafting during which people living in poverty, backed by their organisations, played a central part at every step. The process began in 1987 with the French Economic and Social Council’s adoption of the report Chronic Poverty and Lack of Basic Security, which advocated a comprehensive national poverty eradication strategy. It immediately inspired several anti-poverty measures, although the government did not at that time adopt a comprehensive approach to radically tackle the root causes of poverty through a framework law. In 1992, a far-reaching evaluation of all public policies designed to combat poverty was conducted, comprising for the first time direct opinions of people in situations of extreme poverty collected where they live (in shelters, welfare hotels, trailer camps, etc.). During the same period, thirty non-profit organisations united their voices and campaigned for a national pact against exclusion. Subsequently, a draft bill was proposed in 1996. Although people living in poverty were not formally consulted, they made a point of taking part in the process indirectly. For instance, young people met in their Clubs of Knowledge and Solidarity to scrutinise the bill concerning the military draft. They reacted to many provisions of this bill regarding education, vocational training and job opportunities.  Members of the Fourth World Open University in France also gathered regularly for this purpose, They were eager to be heard and understood because "in the end, all we are asking is decent housing fit for human beings, and that we not be rehoused in a slum, like dogs or rats." They also recalled that all rights complement each other. Whether it is a matter of housing, employment or health, the absence of one of these rights can upset the security of a family. For them, a comprehensive policy is one which takes their plans into account and "which leads somewhere," rather than being limited to training without job opportunities, without housing, without inclusion in society. Those concerns and comments were passed on to local and national governmental bodies. Some of the people’s views were subsequently reflected in the adopted law. It is worth highlighting one provision - it pertains to training of social workers, teachers, police officers and lawyers in the knowledge of very poor individuals and families and in building partnership with them. The law also sets up a monitoring body to gather information concerning the implementation of the law and provides for a regular assessment of progress in which "those in a precarious situation, and grassroots stakeholders" are involved.  Throughout this process, the poorest warned time and again against drafting specific provisions limited to so-called "high-risk categories" of the population. Instead, they expected the law to guarantee the rights of everyone without exception. This fundamental requirement was reflected in the wording of Article 1 of the law : "The struggle against exclusion is a national necessity based on respect for the equal dignity of all human beings and a national priority for all the country’s policies. The present law seeks to guarantee the access of all to fundamental rights in the areas of employment, housing, health protection, justice, education, training, culture, family and child protection." Initially, members of parliament and local elected bodies assumed that the poorest wanted their individual issues resolved. As the process progressed, it was recognised that the very poor were speaking on behalf, not of themselves, but of others in similar situations. That is the most important aspect of this experience. Source : Fourth World Journal, United Kingdom, Summer 1999, London.

 

b. Art and cultural activities

Long-term unemployed workers are cut off from working relationships, just as people overwhelmed by a hand-to-mouth livelihood are prevented from enjoying harmonious social relations. Whereas poverty means isolation and exclusion, artistic and cultural activities can instigate relationships among people who are otherwise cut off from one another. 

A theatre project in rural India described here is one of these initiatives that create enabling conditions where one can meet the disenfranchised outside the context of their everyday problems, as they share from their innermost selves. In Tamil Nadu, widespread unemployment and rampant emigration to cities affected the poorest agricultural labourers - especially among the Dalits, an outcast population - aggravated by occasional outbursts of violence between the castes and the untouchables. Three young Dalit women took it upon themselves to form a theatre group with members of the community. They put on a play expressing their real-life situation as untouchables. Enacting before the whole community the story of the life of the excluded introduced the latter into the collective memory. This experience shed a new light on each person’s identity and status and provoked a rethinking of social norms. Now a growing number of Dalit women, who traditionally do not have access even to school, have asked to join the theatre group.

The importance of access to cultural enrichment for overcoming poverty has been inscribed from the outset in the approach of the International Movement ATD Fourth World. Its founder, Joseph Wresinski, recalled that, during the hunger and destitution of his own childhood, his mother received a musical instrument. 

 

« My mother had her heart set on keeping it. Maybe one of her children would like music and that would help get one off to a good start. Then came the day when people began to say, ‘If these folks have an instrument, then they have money, and it’s not worth the trouble to give them any assistance.’ That was how my mother was forced to sell it for an absurdly low price. In exchange for help, she had to sell hope. The instrument had enabled her to cherish an illusion about my sister’s future. It was a way to love her children and to show them her love that people were tearing away from her in the name of helping the poor. Deep poverty separates people from things that are vital to  them because they provide their hands, their eyes, their tongues, and their hearts with habits - habits that open them up to a culture of the hands, the heart and the mind, and that enable them to build relations with others. Such constant, intense deprivation prevents people in the long run from thinking like everyone else. Even their spiritual life is affected by it. »[54]

 

In 1956, upon moving to the emergency camp of Noisy-le-Grand where 250 homeless families were sheltered, Fr. Wresinski’s first projects promoted access to culture. He opened a library, a pre-school and a women’s community centre, as well as sports clubs and dance classes for the young people. Precisely because these families’ horizons were confined to nothing but overcrowded shelters, ugly huts and muddy roads, Joseph Wresinski was determined to offer them access to the best artistic achievements of their time. He invited well-known artists (Picasso, Miro, Jean Bazaine, Jacques Brel and many others) to share their art with these families. Later, he found the importance of culture in fighting poverty confirmed in the experience of the pianist Miguel Angel Estrella, who grew up impoverished in South America, and who devotes his career today to bringing great music into prisons and other places where people are cut off from culture. 

As ATD Fourth World began working in other countries, both industrialised and developing, most of its projects were based on creating forums where educated people and those with less access to education could engage in creative work together, learning from one another.[55]

Not everyone in the world has the talent to become a great artist ; far from it. But the possibility to create is a right of each and every person. Deep poverty too often excludes people from any hope of unleashing their own creativity. Making sure that the very poor have the means to express themselves creatively opens the path to undiscovered treasures of potential that can greatly enrich all humankind.

Furthermore, in the experience of ATD Fourth World, very often it is art that acts as a safeguard to prevent partnership from sliding toward paternalism. When the very poor have the possibility of expressing both the depths of their suffering and the hopes embedded in their imagination, their relationship to people of other backgrounds changes. The age-old barriers between milieus can begin to blur. 

This initial thrust by Joseph Wresinski - to give art and creativity full-fledged status among more traditional forms of anti-poverty actions - continues to find resonance today in many parts of the world where people share this ambitious vision for building bridges from one person to another. For example, in Cuzco, Peru, ATD Fourth World has in recent years invited artists, both renowned and less known, to join poor families in contributing works of art and mounting an exhibition of oil paintings on the theme of extreme poverty. This initiative involved local public authorities, funding institutions, the artistic community in Cuzco and beyond, and the international community (embassies and international organisations). The date for presenting this exhibition was chosen to coincide with the observance of the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (17 October). The message was conveyed to all visitors that every human being thrives by expressing his or her artistic sensitivity and by vibrating to other human beings’ artistic sensitivity.  A similar initiative was developed by ATD Fourth World in La Paz, Bolivia. The people running these two initiatives decided to reinforce each other in order to expand. This led, in 1999, to a first-class artistic event, today sponsored in this sub-region by Unesco. 

At a symposium on « Culture and Poverty » in 1985, Joseph Wresinski insisted on the link between culture and human relations : "Any cultural action in deprived areas should lead to a sense of unity among the families of the neighbourhood and the community and various neighbourhoods. It should strengthen the rejection of poverty. […] All cultural action should give people the resources to bring their convictions forward and opportunities for making them credible to a wider social environment."[56] It is in this respect that cultural projects are a key determinant of human development as people forge links among themselves, share cultural resources, take possession of history and, together with others, build on the past to shape the future.

The role of the arts, and of creativity and culture in the formation of human abilities and in human development is fundamental. Is it fair that the poorest, who are consistently prevented from doing productive work - as a consequence of long-term unemployment - lack opportunity for fulfilment in other fields ? Cultural participation is one way out of this injustice, if it is conceived as a process of mutual sharing. A very poor man in Senegal saw it this way : "Culture is realising that the greatest thing in one’s life is knowledge. That is what culture means, especially for the poor. All this is summed up in one of our African proverbs : ’The remedy for humanity is humanity.’ Culture is knowing about one’s past and present ; it is the quest to penetrate the future for the good of humankind."

Partnership with the poorest is in itself a culture, an important pathway toward the International Year for the Culture of Peace about to dawn in 2000, and for the efforts that will follow over the decade to come. Are we ready to take on this ambition through a genuine partnership with the poorest, thus transforming their periods of "forced inactivity" into times of human and cultural enrichment, for them personally and for the benefit of the community ? 

 

An unknown actor in social development Noé is a 26-year-old Honduran. Although a man of small stature, he is very strong because his childhood and his youth were spent doing very heavy work. He lives with his mother and grandfather. As a child, he was a shoeshine boy in town. Today you can see him gathering wood in the mountains, for his mother to cook tortillas to be sold by his young sisters in the streets, for the neighbours as well. On Saturday mornings he unloads lorries and vegetable barrows in the peasants’ market.  Sometimes he sits by the roadside with a vacant look, ruminating on his own personal thoughts. In meetings he keeps to himself and remains silent. Because of his long silences, which can last for several days, because of his singing in the streets or his sudden shouts, just for the pleasure of it, some say he is witless. People avoid him. Noé spent a few years at school where he learned rudimentary reading and writing. In 1990, when ATD Fourth World volunteers first arrived in Noé’s district in Tegucigalpa, they invited Noé and other young people to help run the Street Library[57] for the children. Later, Noé said this had changed his life. At first, he was afraid that he would frighten the other children, or that he wouldn’t know how to read a book. Nevertheless, he came - just to see - like all the other young people who started at the Street Library. And then a child came and snuggled up to him ; so he opened a book and began to read out of curiosity. He then realised that he too could give pleasure to a child. He continued to attend the Street Library.  When I arrived there, not knowing anyone or anything, not even the language, Noé was a great help to me. He was the only one who came with me to set up a Street Library in a shantytown, outside the district of Rio, on the banks of a river. Later, he told me he had met the children from there at the Saturday market where, like him, they unloaded lorries - work much too heavy for them. I also found out later that Noé needed great courage to come with me because it added to the mockery and jokes the others made about him. In the bus, he wouldn’t sit next to me and in the street he walked ten metres in front of me. When I left Tegucigalpa some years later, Noé insisted that the Street Library should continue in the shantytown. He even went there alone sometimes because he thought that the children there were most in need of it. Last year when Hurricane Mitch devastated a large part of Central America, and Honduras in particular, the young people of ATD Fourth World organised themselves. Together with ATD Fourth World volunteers from Guatemala who joined them, they went to meet families in the shelters to tell stories to the children, trying to help them get over the shock of the hurricane. Noé was there, even though he had just spent several days in the south to help an uncle dig out his house, which had been covered with mud. The small shantytown on the riverbank in Rio had disappeared completely from the face of the earth ; the families who had lived there were scattered around different shelters. Some families came back quite quickly to their districts and, by leaning a few planks against any walls still standing, had made makeshift shelters. On our first visit there, a mother asked us one thing : to hold a party for the children once the Street Library was in place again.    A short time before we left, Noé told us that he was going to work as a labourer ; a job he had occasionally held between long periods of unemployment. He told me that after several months of this work with pick and shovel, he would "return to the Street Library, to read books with the children, dance and tell stories… because they need this. I too, need this. It is better than loafing around the streets doing nothing." Source : François Jomini, ATD Fourth World

 

Presently, opportunities for involvement in spheres of activities other than the economic field are unequally distributed. To develop and enjoy cultural, social and political participation, one must attain secure and sustainable livelihood. The fact is that exclusion from employment deprive the poorest of the unemployed of the resources and possibilities to participate in the activities of civil society. Similarly the most exploited and underpaid workers, although they may hold a job, hardly have any resources and opportunities for living a satisfying life and for exercising their right to participate in society. Redefining human rights-based development calls for a reorganisation of time spent in and out of productive employment.

 

2.3. Towards a harmonious distribution of opportunities in all fields of human endeavour

It has become vital to go beyond the predominant economic conception of work, according to which work is equated with employment. As early as the 1980s, Joseph Wresinski envisioned the three-fold challenge of universal access to work and livelihood, of re-valuation of unemployment time and of an equitable distribution of time and activities. His vision had already anticipated the prospect of work in the future, taking into consideration the consequences on the labour force of rapid technological changes. Today, analysts and policy-makers foresee a slowing down of job creation that will not be stemmed by higher economic growth ; while the disappearance of traditional trades will not yet be offset by the new highly skilled jobs of the information age.

The ideal is human development. To this end, there is an urgent need to seek a new blend of economic, social and cultural development that would reconcile healthy economies with the right of everyone to contribute to society. This should consequently reconcile economic growth not only with solidarity but also with partnership for all. Therefore, while universal access to work must absolutely be pursued, a cohesive and forward-looking redefinition of human development calls for the promotion of a harmonious distribution in everyone’s life of the times spent inside and outside of productive employment.

This vision of human development is all the more up-to-date as it is echoed by recent findings advocating the right to occupation.[58] « More people everywhere are finding it necessary or desirable to combine several work activities, to move in and out of employment, to indulge in their work-based enthusiasms, and to define themselves in ways not easily captured by statistics. »[59] Redefining human development therefore implies seeking a balanced distribution between time spent at work and time invested in different fields of one’s life - personal and family life ; educational, cultural and creative activity ; working life, comprising formal or informal work ; social activity ; community life ; and spiritual life. 

How can the culturally privileged be induced to make a move towards the very poor who are on the fringes of any right to cultural assets ? How can those who are busy with both economic and socio-cultural activities be enabled to make free time in either of these fields in order to involve in them those who are excluded ? In today’s working life, possibilities of sabbatical time, of leaves of absence devoted to freely chosen retraining, or to voluntary work, have become more and more familiar and practised. They claim and obtain, quite rightly, time that is not for more advanced training strictly in their own field of work but for a significant broadening of their more general cultural education. How can these times for cultural enrichment be geared towards social development ? 

Meanwhile, the numerous workers who actually do not have access to freely chosen productive work and employment are also entitled to cultural enrichment. Depriving this part of our population from contributing to and enjoying all aspects of society’s wealth impoverishes the whole of humankind. The poorest are quick to contribute to the well-being of others ; but are we ready to welcome their contribution ? (See box.)

 

Is this how a caring society for all ages is promoted ? Every Friday, Marie went to visit Pierre, an elderly man whose right arm is handicapped. She helped him do his housework, and cleaned the windows and the sidewalk. This act of caring, which deserves recognition, was instead penalised, because Marie was on the dole. An ill-disposed neighbour gave word to the National Employment Agency (NEA) that Marie worked every Friday at a man’s place who had offered her as a « salary » not less than two cars ! The NEA looked into the matter only to find out that the two cars did not exist. But Marie admitted that when she gave Pierre a helping hand, he offered her sandwich snacks. For this « crime » of having worked while being registered as jobless, the NEA demanded that Marie return the unemployment benefits for all the Fridays of 1995 and, as a punishment, cut four entire weeks from her benefits in 1996.  Thanks to legal advice by a trade union, Marie appealed to the Labour Court and the sanction was lifted. So is all well ? Not quite. The trouble is that Marie was punished by the NEA in 1996 with immediate effect. And the sanction was lifted only in 1999. For three long years Marie’s life has been in upheaval because of financial problems and the scathing violation of her privacy. Source : Excerpt from « Syndicat, » periodical of the Federation of Trade Unions in Belgium (FGTB), 22/10/1999.

 

For a long time now, this redistribution of opportunities in terms of time or activities has been initiated by the work of civil society organisations. For example, the International Movement ATD Fourth World has been built by various forms of commitments made by people of diverse backgrounds and from several continents. Adults, themselves from very disadvantaged backgrounds, have dedicated their time and energy to seeking out very excluded people and helping them break free. Toward that aim, they spend their free time receiving training and building their capacities. In this process, they become partners with others from different walks of life. The commitments of the latter take another form. They devote their skills and part of their time to projects carried out in partnership with the poorest at a grass-roots level or to consciousness-raising within their milieu. Others make a full-time commitment to the Fourth World Volunteer Corps, living and working alongside the most downtrodden individuals and families over the long term. 

The double exclusion of so many of our fellow human beings - from decent work and from other forms of human fulfilment and participation in society - continues to jeopardise social integration and unravel the social fabric. Redefining human development is imperative. This redefinition depends on affirming the right of every person to be useful and to participate fully in creating the economic, social, cultural and spiritual wealth of society and humankind. To put into practice a harmonious distribution of opportunities in all fields of human activity requires a specific partnership - one that the poorest have taken the lead in creating. As we stand at the threshold of a new millennium, may this partnership inspire a world-wide undertaking that harnesses resources and inventiveness across all nations, in order to build a culture for overcoming human poverty. 

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PART THREE : FURTHER INITIATIVES

The Wresinski Approach - Redefining human development

 

Based on the experience and reflections developed throughout this document, the International Movement ATD Fourth World proposes the following further initiatives to implement the commitments taken at the Copenhagen Summit. These proposals are an integral part of what we call the Wresinski Approach, and they must be understood in the context of the conditions for partnership with the poorest elaborated in Part One of this paper. 

All the initiatives proposed in relation to the three core issues of the Summit’s commitments should be implemented in an integrated way, to ensure as much as possible that their coherence is taken into account and is visible at all stages. A realistic view implies the recognition that not everything can be undertaken at the same time ; but public policies should indicate a strong political will to follow the compass toward the comprehensive and forward-looking approach committed to in Copenhagen.

 

 

3.1 Social integration

a. Harmony and cultural enrichment : Reaching the poorest

 

"We feel as if we don’t belong to the real world. What kind of future do we have then ? No work, no money, no freedom, nothing we can do. Without a job we can’t envisage beginning a family. The young people I know don’t want to have children because life is too difficult. Those who already have children asked themselves, ’If things go on as they are, what kind of life will they have ?’ "

 

This young woman expresses the alienation felt by so many of our world’s poorest citizens. Many actors continue to try to create decent employment opportunities for everyone, while providing the support and training necessary if those who are most excluded from the labour market are to benefit. But these economic solutions must also be accompanied by an investment in all the different aspects of human life :

§   Creating conditions that foster harmony in educational, cultural and creative activity, in social activity and community life ; and enabling meaningful participation in public life, including political life. This should include promoting in everyone’s life a harmonious distribution of time devoted to all spheres of activities - balancing remunerated work with time for nurturing family members, neighbours and others, and for political, social and cultural participation.

§  Broadening access to art and science so as to contribute to each person’s and each community’s cultural enrichment, as well as stimulating each person’s potential creativity for the benefit of the community. 

 

The importance of these approaches to social integration were illustrated in the situations given in Part Two of this document : For instance, when the three Dalit women in India put on a play for the community depicting their real-life situation as untouchables, they introduced the lives of the excluded into collective memory. Similarly, the very poor parents in Côte d’Ivoire - who now meet regularly to bear witness to situations of injustice, and to strengthen connections to others who are fighting poverty - say : "These gatherings make us move forward, they stimulate our ideas for getting out of poverty."

 

b. People of diverse backgrounds making a personal commitment

People of all ages and at any time in their lives should be urged to voluntarily dedicate their time and talents to the fight against extreme poverty. This commitment might take various forms. It could be through participation in specific activities in areas of extreme poverty, with governmental and non-governmental agencies. It could be through sharing employment. 

Wherever the poorest have been condemned to feeling useless, economic autonomy must be no less of a priority than creating opportunities where they can meet people from other backgrounds in order to learn from one another, and to try their collective hand at creative activities. 

In addition to using their spare time to contribute to these efforts in their communities, people of all walks of life should be encouraged to make a full-time commitment through non-profit organisations dedicated to overcoming extreme poverty, for periods of a few months, a year, or a few years. 

The International Year of Volunteers, 2001, should be an opportunity to evaluate and reinforce existing efforts in this field. This could be done within the framework of the United Nations Volunteers Programme or of initiatives taken by Member States or by the NGO community around the world. 

 

c. Leadership in the commitment to fighting poverty

To create a consensus among their population for a commitment to fighting poverty and to encourage individual involvement on a larger scale, governments and intergovernmental bodies should give the necessary impetus in the most appropriate ways, taking into account local customs and traditions. 

§  One such way is showing how these contributions in fighting poverty are valued. For instance, the United Kingdom is planning to introduce pension credits for those voluntarily providing care to the elderly and disabled. There are also several programs in the United States that reward the voluntary service commitments of young people by offering scholarships for higher education. Where possible, other such programmes could include sustainable financial support for initiatives that offer the possibility of sharing work and sharing cultural enrichment. It could also include financial support for sabbatical times for all - including the very poor, in work or out of work - which would provide possibilities for learning new skills, of enlarging cultural and social horizons. Universities in Thailand provide training and monitoring to post-graduate students who make a commitment to working in very poor communities. 

§  Leadership is also needed to provide the necessary institutional and financial framework to support individual involvement, perhaps under the auspices of the United Nations. For instance, a recognised status could be created for those who work for a minimum of two years specifically for the eradication of extreme poverty. 

 

The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty - 17 October - can be a launching point for these activities. Governments should follow the example of the Philippines, which has declared this a national day for people to unite in efforts guided by the very poor themselves. 

In the short term, within the context of the International Year for the Culture of Peace (2000), UNESCO should be entrusted with the mandate of ensuring that the poorest population groups throughout the world have significant input, both during the celebration of this Year and to the proposals for follow-up. It is recommended that 17 October 2000 be dedicated to the link between constructing peace and overcoming poverty.

 

3.2 Full employment 

Employment is essential for every person to ensure his or her personal and familial financial security. Employment with dignity provides workers with the resources to participate meaningfully in public life. As the world knows all too well, however, too many people remain out of work. Two groups of workers deserve special attention. Among unemployed workers, those who have few or no skills have fewer and fewer opportunities to enter any work situation. Among those currently working, in either the formal or informal sector, the most vulnerable workers not only do not receive adequate remuneration, they also have little or no opportunity to acquire skills and to broaden their social and cultural horizons.

Owing to technological changes, job profiles have rapidly evolved and new skills are required. These two categories of workers are at risk of being definitively excluded from productive, appropriately remunerated and freely chosen employment. Reaffirming the right to this kind of employment implies making a choice - that of building a world in which all men and women can « contribute to the well-being of their families, their communities and humankind » (Paragraph 9 of the Copenhagen Declaration). To this end, important tools must now be deployed in several domains. 

 

a. Ensuring decent livelihood and training opportunities for very poor workers 

Employment policies should be developed together with training policies in order to offer very poor workers the opportunities that would allow them to secure a decent livelihood as well as to expand their knowledge and abilities in areas that prepare them for the modern labour market. If they work part-time, other forms of income for training should supplement income from work. 

The challenges behind this ambition are enormous. How, for example, can the funding necessary to finance these workers, including jobless workers, be secured so that they can have access to sufficient income while benefiting from training schemes ? Which training schemes should be developed, and under whose responsibility, so that the situation of these workers is taken into account and so that they gain new skills and knowledge ?

Broadening access to decent livelihood and training opportunities for modern work to very poor workers, male and female alike, is an ambition that cannot be shouldered by Governments alone. The business sector, trade-unions and civil society must join such efforts. 

At the national level, Governments should take a leading role by launching pilot initiatives or supporting existing ones in view of these objectives. They should also encourage the creation of enterprises that implement, in a sustainable way, the objectives described above. Governments should also draw lessons from existing governmental or private initiatives launched in this vein. In this respect, experience already gained, such as that related in Part Two of this paper, could serve as a reference. 

At the international level, the International Labour Office in particular should be entrusted with the tasks of drawing lessons from attempts that have been made in some countries to fulfil the above-stated ambition, and of making further proposals.

 

b. Transforming times of forced unemployed into times of human advancement

Considerable efforts are undertaken by Governments, by the business sector and by social partners to offer all workers the training necessary to acquire skills adapted to a labour market in constant evolution. Nevertheless, the mere fact that every year an additional 43 million people enter the labour market - 118,000 persons per day[60] - raises the question of what will happen to those workers during periods of unemployment between one job and another. The so-called « lifetime job » is disappearing. All workers will at some time face the challenge of transition between two work situations. In this respect, the experiences and the thoughts of the poorest workers can give us a fresh perspective on the question of transition times between unemployment and employment.

For the workers with the least skills and education, more often than not, times of unemployment stretch into times of waiting, of wasting time, of deadened time. The longer such times last, the more severely they affect the possibility of re-entering the labour market. This is why time spent out of work must absolutely be thought of in a different light. Instead of expending all one’s energies for survival, workers should have the security of a decent income to live on. This security in turn provides the means for all people to freely exercise cultural, social, civic, political, trade unionist or other types of activities. Security is necessary for the poorest not only to improve their skills in fields of their choice, but also to be part of cultural enrichment, thus preparing themselves for inventing completely new areas of activity, as discussed in Part Two.

The International Labour Office has concrete data on systems of social protection and on unemployment benefits throughout the world, and provides technical support to countries in the process of installing or modernising such systems. Thus, the ILO would be the appropriate agency to explore the transformation of unemployment times into times of transition towards employment. 

 

c. Redefining transition times between different human activities

In addition to reconsidering transition times between unemployment and employment, there is another challenge. Society needs to rethink the connections and the transitions in everyone’s life among the varied forms of human activity - not only employment and unemployment, but also education and employment ; training and employment ; civic participation and employment ; trade unions, cultural activities, political life, voluntary work, and employment, and so on.

 

Rethinking these connections requires a two-fold proposal.

On the one hand, the poorest should be offered opportunities to use for personal advancement any time spent out of productive employment. On the other hand, those who are productively employed should accept - and be encouraged and supported - to leave their job situation for some time in order to go and share their skills and know-how with very poor populations, as do the United Nations Volunteers. Such commitments could take various forms, from a few hours to one or more « sabbatical years. » A number of projects in different countries have attempted to support this kind of commitment. There are projects initiated by private businesses, for example the program « One Hundred Hours » run by Marks and Spencer U.K. and its subsidiaries, whereby the company released 100 working hours (to be spread over a few hours each week) to its staff so that they can join non-profit organisations in disadvantaged areas in order to share their expertise. Other initiatives relate to civil servants who can be supported in offering their services to a non-governmental organisation. A review of existing experiences would shed light on how to give a wider framework of support to such practices. The International Year of Volunteers, 2001, could be an ideal time to start such a review. 

The efforts of the Secretary General of the United Nations toward building a new partnership between businesses and the United Nations, and in particular the co-operation established between the United Nations and the International Chambers of Commerce, can find in this proposal appropriate ground for developing new initiatives.

 

3.3 Eradication of poverty

a. Partnership with the poorest in designing comprehensive national policies for eradicating poverty

As Governments progress in formulating national policies and strategies for poverty eradication and social development, as per the Copenhagen commitments, they should focus sharply on gathering the experience and views of their poorest citizens and taking them into account. The United Nations could also survey the expertise of different grass-roots actors in civil society in order to furnish technical support for these national policies.

The Copenhagen Summit emphasised involving people who live in poverty and their organisations in the design, implementation, monitoring and assessment of national strategies and programmes for overcoming poverty. To ensure that they can contribute to the elaboration of national plans, partnership with the poorest is essential. The steps of this process are highlighted in Part One of this paper (discovering hidden realities, basing projects on the aspirations of the poorest, strengthening the family unit, building on existing solidarity, acquiring in-depth knowledge and understanding of the poorest, and fostering together a common culture). The conditions necessary for this partnership, as shown by experience, are also outlined in Part One - investing the necessary time, trust and confidence, commitment to common goals, mutual training, consensus building and broad-based participation. 

At a minimum, Governments should initiate the process by including in their national plans for social development a programme for working with all citizens, including the poorest, to elaborate a more specific plan for overcoming poverty. 

Mention should be made here of national initiatives for eradicating poverty that have in fact been designed through a process of partnership with all concerned, including the very poor themselves. One example is the Law Against Social Exclusion adopted in France in 1998, as detailed in Part Two of this paper. Another example comes from South Africa, where Poverty Hearings and other initiatives led to a National Poverty Forum working on the adoption of the National Programme of Action to Eradicate Poverty, in implementing commitments made at the Copenhagen Summit. This Programme of Action is not limited to government departments ; it also includes plans for poverty alleviation and eradication by NGOs, the business sector and educational and religious institutions.

 

b. Implementing the recommendations made at regional and international levels

Since Copenhagen, initiatives have been undertaken and proposals made at regional and international levels to anchor the necessity of building schemes against poverty. The statement of commitment to action to eradicate poverty, issued in June 1998 by the executive heads of all UN agencies (the Administrative Committee on Co-ordination), well sums up this emphasis when it reaffirms that « poverty eradication is a key international commitment and a central objective of the United Nations system. »

Procedures to monitor the follow-up of these proposals have been set up and, in this respect, the Commission for Social Development of the United Nations plays an active and central role. 

Still, the issue of working in partnership with the poorest to craft programmes for fighting poverty has not been fully undertaken. It is relevant to recall the proposal made in the Final Report on Human Rights and Extreme Poverty (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1996/13) adopted by the UN Commission on Human Rights. The report outlines that (paragraph 220), whereas for the commitment on employment the Copenhagen Summit foresees an appropriate machinery, i.e. the ILO, no such a provision exists for the commitments on social integration and eradication of poverty. This report suggests that the High Commissioner for Human Rights should be given a leading role, because the implementation of coherent policies for overcoming extreme poverty is intimately linked with the holistic approach towards the realisation of all human rights. 

It is necessary to empower an appropriate UN body for furthering the initiatives that will come out of the Special Session of the General Assembly on the implementation of the Copenhagen commitments. The designation of such leadership within the United Nations system could also facilitate this gathering of expertise from different grassroots actors in civil society, in order to furnish technical support for the national comprehensive policies for eradicating poverty.

A specific mandate should be given to the High Commissioner for Human Rights in this framework, given the inextricable link between human rights and overcoming poverty.

 

c. A Convention for Overcoming Human Poverty

On the basis of these national and international efforts, a working group should be set up to study the feasibility of a legally binding Convention on Overcoming Human Poverty, crafted in partnership with the people who live in deep poverty and with those committed alongside them. This idea of preparing a legally binding convention on the eradication of poverty has been brought forward by ILO Director-General Juan Somavia, in order to follow through on the political commitments made at the World Summit for Social Development.[61]

This convention should not define new rights for specific groups but rather promote a coherent, dynamic and forward-looking approach to recognise the human dignity of every human being and to ensure that all persons be able to exercise their human rights. The world’s most disadvantaged citizens, who have shown us that human rights are indivisible, have a key role to play in shaping this convention as a tool to further the creation of national frameworks for an overall and coherent approach toward all human rights, be they civil or political, economic, social or cultural.

Grinding poverty can be found in every country. The convention should therefore address itself to all nations, regardless of their political, economic, social or cultural situation. The convention should also encourage all countries to share their experience and knowledge as partners in fighting poverty. The experience at the grassroots level among individuals and communities outlined in Parts One and Two of this paper should inspire co-operation and solidarity between all nations to achieve the common goal of overcoming human poverty. Countries in particularly difficult situations, if they so desire, should be given access to facilities in order to be supported in the most appropriate way. Among other partners, the very poor must be associated with this work, through non-governmental organisations and other organisations of civil society that they have chosen to represent them.

When the nations of the world grew more aware of and sensitive to specific conditions violating the rights of children, the United Nations was able to adopt the International Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Conventions on the Elimination of the All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, also became tools for broadening access to justice for all. As the international community grows increasingly more sensitive to the situation of the very poorest individuals, families and communities, it deserves a tool worthy of enabling them to exercise all their fundamental rights and to assume their responsibilities.

 

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SELECTED REFERENCES

 

ATD Fourth World, UK. 1996. Talk With Us and Not at Us : How to Develop a Partnership Between Families in Poverty and Professionals. Paris : Fourth World Publications.

ATD Fourth World, UK. 1991. The Wresinski Approach : The Poorest - Partners in Democracy. London : Fourth World Publications.

de Vos van Steenwijk, Alwine A. 1995. Rethinking Human Activity in Order to Fight Poverty and Exclusion (Pour combattre la pauvreté et l’exclusion, repenser l’activité humaine). Contribution by the International ATD Fourth World Movement to the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen. Submitted to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. January 1995

Economic and Social Council of France. 1987. Report « Grande pauvreté et précarité économique et sociale » submitted by the Rapporteur Joseph Wresinski. Journal officiel de la République Française. 28 February 1987. Paris. (English translation : 1994. The Wresinski Report : Chronic Poverty and Lack of Basic Security. Landover, MD : New/Fourth World Movement).

European Commission - Directorate General X. 1995. « Culture and Human Activity for Overcoming Poverty. » Proceedings of the European Colloquium ‘Role of Culture in Combating Poverty.’ 8-9 June 1995. Brussels : European Commission/International Movement ATD Fourth World.

Godinot, Xavier (ed). 1995. On voudrait connaître le secret du travail. Paris : Editions de l’Atelier/Editions Quart Monde. (English summary : Finding Work : Tell Us the Secret)

ILO. 1999. Decent Work. Report of the Director-General. International Labour Conference , 87th Session 1999. Geneva : ILO

International Movement ATD Fourth World. 1994. The Family Album. Paris : Editions Quart Monde.

International Movement ATD Fourth World. 1995. Fourth World Families, Actors of Development. Study submitted to the UN Secretariat for the International Year of the Family. Subsequently published under the title : This is How We Live - Listening to the Poorest Families. New York : Fourth World Publications.

Offe, Claus. 1997. « Towards a New Equilibrium of Citizens’ Rights and Economic Resources ? » Societal Cohesion and the Globalising Economy. Paris : OECD

Rosenfeld, Jona M. and Brigitte Jaboureck. 1989. « Emergence From Extreme Poverty ». Paris : Editions Quart Monde.

Sen, Binayak and Sharifa Begum. 1998. « Methodology for identifying the poorest at local level ». Macroeconomics, Health and Development. Series N°27, February 1998. Geneva : WHO/ICO.

Social Watch. 1999. Social Watch. Volume N°3. Montevideo : Instituto del Tercer Mundo.

Standing, Guy. 1999. « From labour to work : The global challenge ». World of Work. The Magazine of the ILO. N°31, Sept./Oct.1999, pp18-19. Geneva : ILO.

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UN, Department of Economic and Social Affairs.1997. Aspects of World Employment Strategy. (Author : John Langmore. Director. Division for Social Policy and Development). New York.

UN, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Social Policy and Development. 1998. Poverty Reduction Strategies. A Review (Author : Paul Shaffer). New York. (ST/ESA/260). 

UN, General Assembly. 1999. Preparatory Committee for the Special Session of the General Assembly on the Implementation of the Outcome of the World Summit for Social Development and Future Initiatives. Report on the first session (17-29 May and 15 July). Official Records Fifty-fourth Session Supplement No.45 (A/54/45) ; Proposed outcome : revised text submitted by the Chairman of the Preparatory Committee (A/AC.253/L.5/Rev.1).

UN, ECOSOC, Commission on Human Rights. 1996. Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities : The Final Report on Human Rights and Extreme Poverty. Rapporteur : Leandro Despouy. 28 June 1996. New York : United Nations Document (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1996/13). 

United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. 1999. Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific, « Asia and the Pacific in the Twenty-First Century : Information Technology, Globalization, Economic Security and Development ». New York : United Nations Publication.

UNDP. 1998. Overcoming Human Poverty. UNDP Human Poverty Report 1998. New York : United Nations Publication.

UNDP. 1999. Human Development Report. New York : Oxford University Press.

UNESCO, Standing Committee of NGOs. 1997. Working Group ‘Culture and Development’. Culture to overcome Poverty, Ten practical experiments in escaping from situations of exclusion. Contribution to the World Decade for Cultural Development (1988-1997) and to the the First United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (1997-2006).(CLT-97/WS/8)

UNICEF. 1989. The State of the World’s Children. New York : UNICEF

UNICEF and International Movement ATD Fourth World. 1996. Reaching the poorest. (Atteindre les plus pauvres) New York/Paris : UNICEF/Editions Quart Monde.

Wresinksi, Joseph. 1994. The Very Poor, Living Proof of the Indivisibility of Human Rights. Collection Cahiers de Baillet. Paris : Editions Quart Monde. (Translated from : « Les plus pauvres révélateurs de l’indivisibilité des Droits de l’homme ». In : 1989 - Les Droits de l’homme en question. 1989. Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme. Paris : La documentation française. Pp 221-237).

 

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Appendix   The International Movement ATD Fourth World is an international non-governmental organisation that engages individuals and institutions in support of the efforts of the very poor to free themselves from destitution. ATD Fourth World is concerned with the well-being of all people, and of society as a whole. ATD Fourth World : §  was founded in 1957 by Fr. Joseph Wresinski, whose family had suffered from great poverty. Today ATD Fourth World has branches in 26 countries in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as well as correspondents in more than 100 countries through its network, « the Permanent Forum on Extreme Poverty in the World. » §  is not affiliated with any political party or religion. The ideal that unites its members is that of ensuring respect for each person’s human dignity. ATD Fourth World’s financial resources come mostly from private sources - such as donations and membership pledges, sales of publications, grants from foundations - and partly from public funding, both governmental and intergovernmental. ATD Fourth World’s greatest resource is the time and creativity donated by its members. §  works at the grass-roots level with persons and communities in very destitute and remote areas, both urban and rural. It runs multi-faceted projects developed in partnership with these persons and communities. These projects vary from training and creating employment, to fostering artistic creation, education, social participation, good health and protection of the environment. §  reaches out to public opinion through newsletters and various publications, seminars and conferences. When possible, ATD Fourth World collaborates with public administrations and legislative bodies. It networks with other NGOs. ATD Fourth World’s Institute for Research and Training conducts surveys and studies, and publishes a quarterly review.     To carry out its responsibilities, ATD Fourth World relies on people of all ages, from different social and cultural backgrounds and different professions. Some of them dedicate all or part of their lives alongside the very poor ; others make a commitment in their own social, professional or cultural milieu. They strive to improve mutual understanding between the most excluded and the rest of society and to promote new commitments towards a more just and equitable society. ATD Fourth World has general consultative status with ECOSOC. It also holds consultative status with UNICEF, UNESCO, the ILO and the Council of Europe. It has a permanent delegation to the European Union.

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[1] Address by James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank Group, to the Board of Governors, September 28, 1999.

[2] UNDP Human Poverty Report 1998, "Overcoming Human Poverty. »

[3] cf. Statement of commitment of the UN Administrative Committee on Co-ordination for action to eradicate poverty (E/1998/73)

[4] See in particular the 1993 report "Fourth World families, actors of development," submitted to the UN Secretariat for the International Year of the Family, and subsequently published under the title This is How We Live - Listening to the Poorest Families, Fourth World Publications, Landover, Maryland, 1995, 174 pages.

[5] UNDP Poverty Report 1998, « Overcoming Human Poverty, » page 14.

[6] UN General Assembly Resolution 53/146 and UN Human Rights Commission Resolution 1996/23 adopting the Final Report on human rights and extreme poverty, submitted by the Special Rapporteur, Leandro Despouy (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1996/13). Work on the issue of human rights and extreme poverty has continued with the nomination of an independent expert, Anne-Marie Lizin.

[7] The original stone was inaugurated on October 17, 1987, at the Plaza of Human Rights and Liberties (Trocadero) in France.

[8] World Development Report 1999/2000, The World Bank Group.

[9] cf. Final Report on human rights and extreme poverty (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1996/13). This definition was formulated by Fr. Joseph Wresinski, and adopted by the Economic and Social Council of France, in the Report "Grande pauvreté et précarité économique et sociale, » February 1987. (Translation In English, The Wresinski Report : Chronic Poverty and Lack of Basic Security, published in 1994.)

[10] UNICEF uses the term « the poorest » to refer to groups that have not yet been reached by its programmes that aim at covering the entire population of poor people. See also « Methodology for identifying the poorest at local level, » Binayak Sen and Sharifa Begum, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, Dhaka, Bangladesh, published by ICO and WHO, Geneva ; February 1998.

[11] The State of the World’s Children, New York, 1989, page 157

[12] Copenhagen Programme of action, para 29/b and para. 83/h

[13] Copenhagen Summit, Programme of Action, para. 35

[14] Copenhagen Summit, Programme of Action, para. 24 and 35

[15] Several of these findings are also supported by a study conducted jointly by UNICEF and ATD Fourth World, which examined projects in seven countries over four years (1992-1996) to identify ways of reaching the poorest. This study was published in Reaching the Poorest, co-edited by UNICEF and Editions Quart Monde, New York/Paris, 1996.

[16] Cf., Reaching the Poorest, op. cit.

[17] Social Service Department of the Kadiogo province (DPASK, Direction provinciale de l’Action sociale du Kadiogo), member of the Study group "Support for Family Reintegration," Burkina Faso.

[18] Lenore Cola, representing ATD Fourth World at a panel discussion on the occasion of the International Day of Families, 15 May 1999, at the United Nations in New York.

[19] Members of the study group "Support for Family Reintegration" (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso) comprise AEMO (Action Educative en Milieu Ouvert, Outreach Education Programme), ANERSER (Association Nationale pour l’Education et la Réinsertion Sociale de Enfants de la Rue, National Association for the Education and Social Reintegration of Street Children), DPASK (Direction provinciale de l’Action sociale du Kadiogo, Social Service Department of the Kadiogo province), MCC (Intervenants auprès des mineurs à la Maco, Protection of Minors of the precinct of Maco) and ATD Fourth World.

[20] Vincent Fanelli, ATD Fourth World, USA.

[21] « Strict Shelter Rules Force Many Families Out, » The New York Times, by Nina Bernstein, Nov. 29, 1999.

[22] Source : ATD Fourth World

[23] « Making a little go a long way, » article by Babacar Sall, in Le Courrier de l’UNESCO, January 1998.

[24] Study group "Support for Family Reintegration," Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

[25] Cf. Reaching the Poorest, op. cit.

[26] Cf. UNESCO, Standing Committee of NGOs, 1997. Working Group « Culture and Development. » Culture to Overcome Poverty, Ten practical experiments in escaping from situations of exclusion. Contribution to the World Decade for Cultural Development (1988-1997) and to the first United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (1997-2006). (CLT-97/WS/8)

[27] Testimonial at the exhibit of artwork by very poor adults in Brussels, Jacques Brel gallery, 1988.

[28] Using art and poetry to fight poverty has been part of ATD Fourth World’s work since its beginning in the late 1950s. In different parts of the world, workshops have been created where people from different social and cultural backgrounds can meet, be creative and share their skills in arts, crafts, artistic use of computer technology, etc.

[29] These indicators of success are inspired by the research of Prof. Jona M. Rosenfeld, Cf. Emergence from Extreme Poverty, Science & Service Editions, Paris, 1989. This paper illustrates his findings with more recent examples.

[30] Cf. Letter to Friends around the World (periodical of the Permanent Forum "Extreme Poverty in the World), N°39, August 1997.

[31] Ligaya Sibucao, ATD Fourth World, Philippines.

[32] Source : ATD Fourth World, Madagascar.

[33] From interviews by Martine Hosselet, « For the Right to Beauty, » European Commission - Directorate General X 1995. Excerpted from Culture and Human Activity for Overcoming Poverty : Proceedings of the European Colloquium ‘Role of Culture in Combating Poverty,’ 8-9 June 1995, Brussels : European Commission/International Movement ATD Fourth World, p.12.

[34] ATD Fourth World runs a Street Library regularly throughout the year, with an annual Festival of Learning characterised by more intensive cultural activities for the children.

[35] Cf. Reaching the Poorest.

[36] Brigitte Seinnave, ATD Fourth World, Haiti.

[37] UNDP Human Poverty Report 1998, Overcoming Human Poverty, p. 11.

[38] Joseph Wresinski, Chronic Poverty and Lack of Basic Security, Landover, Maryland, 1994 (translated from the report "Grande pauvreté et précarité économique et sociale", February 1987).

[39] Paragraph 9 of the Copenhagen Declaration committed Governments "to enhancing social development throughout the world so that all men and women, especially those living in poverty, may exercise their rights, utilize the resources and share the responsibilities that enable them to lead satisfying lives and to contribute to the well-being of their families and communities and of all humanity. "

[40] This information concerns Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

[41] This is based on interviews and conversations with very poor adults in several countries by the Fourth World Volunteer Corps.

[42] cf. Studies of the European Business Network for Social Cohesion, European Commission : Directorate-General V - Employment, Industrial Relations and Social Affairs, Brussels.

[43] Input by a German Working group on « Unemployment/Employment : New activities and professions (Berlin Declaration : Halving unemployment by the year 2000), Council of Europe, Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of Europe, Strasbourg, 10 January 1995 [CG/GT/EMP (1) 1].

[44] Decent Work, Report of the Director-General, ILO, June 1999, page 21.

[45] cf. pilot projects published in On voudrait connaître le secret du travail, under the direction of Xavier Godinot, Paris, 1995. (Available in an English summary : "Finding Work : Tell Us the Secret")

[46] ILO. World Employment Report 1998-99. Employability in the Global Economy : How Training Matters. Chapter 7.

[47] World Employment Report, p. 170

[48] Sen, Binayak and Sharifa Begum, Methodology for Identifying the Poorest at the Local Level, Technical Paper Number 27, "Macroeconomics, Health and Development" series, ICO and World Health Organisation, February 1998.

[49] Overcoming Human Poverty, UNDP Poverty Report 1998

[50] Decent Work, Report of the Director-General, ILO, June 1999.

[51] Source : Bernadette Pinet, ATD Fourth World, Senegal.

[52] Reading and art activities for children, as described in Part One.

[53] cf. explanation on page 19 .

[54] Source : Joseph Wresinski House, Baillet, France.

[55] Summer Street Festivals of Learning, Street Libraries, Cultural Centres, Art and Poetry Clubs, Computer Workshops, the Fourth World Open University, Courtyards of 100 Trades and other projects.

[56] Excerpts from a speech by Joseph Wresinski at the symposium "Culture and Poverty," Evreux-sur-l’Arbresle, France, 1985.

[57] Cf, explanation on page 13.

[58] Outcome of the Independent Commission on Population and Quality of Life, published in Caring for the Future : Making the Next Decades Provide a Life Worth Living, Oxford University Press, Oxford, Great Britain, 1996.

[59] Guy Standing,  »From Labour to Work : The Global Challenge, » in World of Work, the magazine of the ILO #31, Sept./Oct. 1999, Geneva.

[60] According to ILO figures, 1994

[61] The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development Bulletin, UNRISD No.20, Spring/Summer 1999.