Adapted from When Helping Hurts

It’s easy for most of us to conceptualize a fairly simplistic picture of what poverty looks like. In turn, that overview can generate equally simplistic solutions or treatments. For many, we may have an image in our minds of a destitute population lacking necessary materials for survival. On paper, it seems as though simply providing people in poverty with what they seem to need will solve the problem. While this may provide temporary relief to those in need, it is often only a small adjustment to a much larger problem.

Our poverty alleviation efforts most often take one of three forms. Relief, which is urgent and temporary, provides immediate aid to stop suffering. Rehabilitation involves working with people to restore them to their pre-crisis conditions. Development focuses on empowering individuals to improve their lives over the long term. We’ll unpack these more in a future post, but these brief definitions will be helpful for now. When taking action to help, these different approaches need to be understood in order to be applied properly.

Despite the assumptions or associations we might bring into a situation, not all poverty involves people in destitution or in crisis. As counterproductive as it may seem, asking people how capable they may be of helping themselves can help us determine if a crisis is at hand and if relief is necessary. In many cases, the nature of the problem is more long-term and requires more complex solutions. It’s important to recognize the type of poverty at play and assess what the best approach to alleviation is.

For example, a community struck by a crisis such as the 2004 Indonesian tsunami are left nearly or even entirely helpless against the economic struggles that follow. Crisis is an emergency where relief’s role in recovery comes into play. This is the time for an immediate one-sided effort to pull those in need out of the pit they’re stuck in. While undeniably important, relief is only the first step to recovery, closing a fresh wound to save the victim from bleeding to death. However, in this example, while the people may be saved from drowning or immediate starvation or sickness, their homes are still destroyed and need repair. To continue providing relief long-term doesn’t actually address the core needs of the people affected to get back to the lives they had before the disaster.

The reality is that people in need of immediate relief are only a small percentage of those in material poverty you’ll meet, both in your community and around the world. The cause of a person’s emergency can vary, but what relief situations have in common is someone’s inability to help themselves. Once the bleeding has stopped, continuing to treat them as destitute does more harm than good to all parties involved. Most situations can move fairly quickly toward rehabilitation in order to help communities reach the point they were at before they were hit by a crisis. If nothing is done to address the broader problems, relief supplies will inevitably be used up and the recipients’ situations won’t have improved. Worse, if relief is repeatedly offered when it’s not really needed, it can create dependency, preventing true progress. 

This demonstrates how important context and wisdom are when addressing poverty. Assessment of someone’s situation is always a good first step. This is where we can discover some key information such as what an individual’s level of responsibility for the situation may be, their current capacity to help themselves, and what patterns of dependency (if any) might be present. In addition, we need to maintain cultural sensitivity and avoid imposing our own cultural assumptions onto different contexts. What may seem like an emergency in one culture or community might not be seen the same way in another. The best way to go about determining what a person’s needs are is to meet them where they are and be personal with them. By building trust and showing empathy, we can tailor our support in a way that fosters lasting change.

What’s key to keep in mind when engaging with poverty alleviation is the process of working with people rather than doing things for them. Encouraging people in low-income situations to participate in the process has multiple long-term benefits. When they can directly engage in their recovery together with those who are helping them, they are able to form a greater sense of community and enthusiasm for their own hopes and dreams and learn effective ways to sustain their progress in the long run.

How we understand someone’s poverty is going to determine the course of action we take to help, so the way we respond needs to consider how they respond to their situation. Our intentions are usually good—we want to offer help because someone is caught up in conditions that hinder their ability to manage on their own or their capacity for reaching stability—but rushing in with our own plans without taking time to listen and learn can undermine our goals and cause harm to both ourselves and those we try to serve.