Distinguished Guests, Good evening and thank you for your warm welcome.

I am deeply honored to have been invited by the Southern Africa Trust to the Investing in the future and Drivers of Change Awards Gala Dinner, organized in partnership with the Mail and Guardian, South Africa’s leading independent print media publication. I wish at the very outset to express my appreciation of the commitment and determination of the Southern Africa Trust and its partners to fight and overcome the scourge of poverty in the region of Southern Africa. The Investing in the Future & the Drivers of Change awards provide real encouragement to corporate bodies as well as to individuals and civil society organizations of the region for developing innovative & effective policies and strategies to overcome poverty.  I wish to commend this partnership as it stands as a reference, if not as a model, in particular to the countries of the SADC region, for raising the profile of organizations and individuals committed to creating lasting solutions to poverty.

On 18 up to 20th April this year Mauritius hosted the SADC International Conference on Poverty and Development. We were able to take stock of the extent of poverty in the SADC countries while a SADC Region Poverty Profile was drawn describing the nature, magnitude, dimensions and patterns of poverty in the region. As a result of this Conference, Mauritius is in the process of setting up its Poverty Observatory. Announcing this decision, the current Mauritian Minister of Finance said that “to support the comprehensive policy to eradicate absolute poverty in Mauritius, it is crucial to build capacity in the areas of measuring poverty, monitoring and assessment.” Other countries must no doubt be actively engaged in implementing the recommendations of the Conference, which was attended by most of the Heads of State and of Government of the countries of the region.
 
Each year, the month of October serves as a reminder to the whole world that poverty is still very much with us – I often wonder whether it hasn’t come to stay in our part of the world! Actually, the 17th of October that has, since 1992, been decreed by the United Nations as the International Day for the Elimination of Poverty, is an opportunity to sensitize the world to poverty related problems faced by Humanity at large, those living in developed as well those living in developing countries. While we talk about the third world when referring to poverty and underdevelopment in the poor countries, it has, in the rich countries, been given the name the Fourth-World! ( in French : Le Quart Monde)

 In the context of the global campaign “Stand Up and Take Action against Poverty” which involved some 70 million people across more than 100 countries, 17th October this year witnessed yet another event at the UN headquarters during which the Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro made a fervent plea in favor of the fight against poverty. “There is no time to waste”, she warned “if we are to achieve the Millennium Development Goals of halving extreme poverty and address other social ills by 2015”. Today in the world we still count 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty. (World Bank figure for 2007 indicates  986m).More than 30,000 people die of malnutrition, avoidable diseases and hunger every day. There is indeed no time to waste.
The UN Millennium Campaign, responsible for initiating the annual Stand Up events around the world, has renewed its appeal that governments keep promises made at the Millennium summit in 2000 to achieve the MDGs. The global financial crisis should not be an excuse for breaking promises. It is feared, however, that aid to poor countries would dwindle as the rich ones pump trillions of dollars into their crumbling financial systems the more so as was revealed by Jacques Diouf, Head of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), that agency had only received 10 % of the $22 billion pledged in June to help fight hunger in poor countries. It is said that when the financial markets sneeze, the poor gets pneumonia. There is no doubt that the financial turmoil will hit developing countries in many ways as they are hammered by aid cuts and by falling demand from rich countries. It also means less access to credit for and less investment in poor countries, with the risk of a slow down of the fight against poverty and hunger. The UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon, in his address last month to the UN General Assembly, deplored the fact that according to the present trend “no African country will succeed in reaching all the MDGs in 2015”. This would indeed be dramatic.

Distinguished guests,

What sort of a world are we living in: the United States can find within a couple days $700 billion to bail out its corrupt and errant banks but cannot find a small fraction of that amount for the world poor and dying.  The 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, Joseph Stiglitz describes the financial crisis as the fruit of a pattern of dishonesty on the part of financial institutions and incompetence on the part of policy makers. We had become accustomed to the hypocrisy, he says. The banks reject any suggestion they should face regulation, rebuff any move towards anti-trust measures – yet when trouble strikes, all of a sudden they demand state intervention: they must be bailed out; they are too big, too important to be allowed to fail” “It doesn’t make sense to the world community” says UN adviser Jeffrey Sachs “the puzzlement was all the greater since the very banks being bailed out so generously had awarded themselves more than $30 billion in bonuses early this year, roughly the world’s entire aid budget for 800 million people in sub-Saharan Africa” This is the sort of world we are living in. And these same people will dare come and preach to us on the need for good governance, transparency and integrity!

Already in the 2005 Millennium Development Goals Report, it was noted that the number of poor in Africa was rising. During the 1990’s, writes the Report, extreme poverty dropped in much of Asia, fell slowly in Latin America, changed little in Northern Africa and Western Asia, and rose and then started to decline in the transition economies. But in sub-Saharan Africa, which already had the highest poverty rate in the world, the situation deteriorated further and millions more fell into deep poverty. The same result was found regarding child nutrition: while progress was made in Eastern Asia where the number of malnourished children declined from 24 to 10 million, in sub-Saharan Africa, the number of underweight children increased from 29 million to 37 million between 1990 and 2003. Our continent is also still plagued with the HIV/AIDS pandemic with serious impact on the education of the African child. In a single year (1999) alone, 1 million children in sub-Saharan Africa lost their teachers to AIDS. The cumulative effect of death as a result of AIDS has been placing an untenable burden on many countries that already lacked sufficient trained teachers. When parents become ill with AIDS, children are often pulled out of school to care for them, take on other household responsibilities or work to support the family. When parents die, children often leave school because of economic hardship. 

In the area of child mortality, almost half of all deaths among children under age 5 occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where progress has slowed owing to weak health systems, conflicts and AIDS. Countries reeling from AIDS, especially in Southern Africa, have also seen sudden rises in under-five mortality.

These depressing statistics instead of being a source of discouragement, invite stronger state action, community involvement and personal commitment in order to beat the beast – poverty, AIDS, child mortality, school drop outs are all interlinked and need to be addressed concurrently, not separately.

Poverty is man-made: its eradication lies with mankind, with you, with you and me, with all of us. It is not for the State only to fight poverty, it is everybody’s responsibility. Concerted effort is therefore required. This is why corporate bodies, civil society organizations, individuals, at national, regional and international levels, should come together and cooperate in the struggle for the elimination of poverty - poverty that I consider to be a blot on Humanity’s conscience. Father Joseph Wresinsky, founder of the France-based anti-poverty organization called ATD-Quart Monde, who was instrumental in the UN decreeing the 17th October as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, considered Poverty as a violation of Human Rights. Wherever there exists poverty, says Joseph Wresinsky, human rights are violated. To unite and fight that scourge is the sacred duty of one and all.

The fight against poverty should not be treated as a partisan issue but instead as an above-political-parties’ issue: I would therefore renew my plea here that the Opposition be invited to cooperate with the Government in the war against poverty, the only war worth waging in the 21st century. What is required is the institution of an all inclusive war cabinet – the word is not too strong, and the proposal, I contend is not far-fetched given the scale of the problems related to poverty and the urgency for us to face them. The war cabinet will come up with appropriate strategies and programs drawing on the contribution of the whole population and involving at all levels the poor themselves, united in the war against poverty and its dire consequences. The war is waged with the poor not on behalf of or for the poor by a mobilized country. This is how we shall succeed in building sustainable democracies that work to overcome poverty forever.

I am aware that the Southern Africa Trust, through its change4ever campaign, is busy sensitizing the population to the need to address the root causes of poverty and to learn to be self-sufficient in human and financial resources so as not to depend indefinitely on the generosity of European and other western countries. I couldn’t agree more with this effort at dignified independence and self reliance and I hope that other countries of the region will emulate this endeavor.

I often describe poverty as a trap and those who fall in that trap are drawn into a vicious circle, moving from bad to worse situations. Experience has shown that one of the successful ways of breaking this vicious circle or moving out it is through Education: This is why a lot of emphasis should be laid on Education for All – especially on the type of Educational system that includes instead of excludes children from poor and vulnerable families. Free and compulsory education to children of poor families coupled with positive actions to enable them to operate on a level-playing field and to benefit from equal opportunities (through food supplement, free text books, private tuition etc) is probably the surest way out of the poverty trap.

In a bid to eradicate extreme poverty in Mauritius, the current government has initiated an Eradication of Absolute Poverty Programme, in partnership with the private sector’s Corporate Social responsibility programme, for which a sum of nearly Rs400m has been earmarked. The idea is to prevent poverty from breeding poverty. The progamme includes free transportation facilities to and from school, free food pack for the day, free school materials, free clothing, counseling to parents, free medical check-ups and eye glasses and hearing aids to those in need. This is what I meant when I referred a little while ago to Education for All associated with positive actions for the poorest of the poor.
 
I feel I have taken much more time than originally allocated to me. Otherwise I would have dealt with another important factor responsible for poverty and that is corruption. The fight against poverty is closely linked to the fight against corruption and a Poverty Reduction strategy especially in the poorest countries must necessarily include the fight against corruption. “Corruption, according to former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, hurts poor people in developing countries disproportionately. It affects their daily life in many different ways, and tends to make them even poorer, by denying them their rightful share of economic resources or life-saving aid. Corruption puts basic public services beyond the reach of those who cannot afford to pay bribes. By diverting scarce resources intended for development, corruption also makes it harder to meet fundamental needs such as those for food, health and education.”

The 2008 Perception of Corruption Index of Transparency International includes only 3 African countries with a ranking above the average of 5 (on a 1—10 scale) and they are Botswana, Mauritius and Cape Verde. South Africa falls short of the average by 0.1 at 4.9, while out of the ten most corrupt countries six are from our continent. There is here a special effort to make if we believe that, in poor countries, in developing countries to fight corruption is to fight poverty.

Distinguished Guests,

May I be allowed, by way of conclusion, to underscore the remarkable contribution of many private firms, NGO’s, social workers and community leaders engaged in the Alleviation of Poverty programmes and other anti-poverty activities in our region. They deserve our recognition and are all worthy of an award even if their names do not appear on the final list of awardees. Congratulations to all of you, the award winners, those short-listed as well as the participants.

I thank you for your kind attention.