The end of poverty?

You have probably noticed that the majority of the clothes that we buy in those modern boutiques such as GAP, H&M, Zarra and the like were made in India, Pakistan, Turkey, Thailand, Bangladesh. I don’t know what kind of thoughts are being evoked by the etiquette on your new H&M shirt but I have always imagined thousands of impoverished women sitting in front of sewing machines. Treated like dogs. Paid less than enough to feed their numerous skinny children. Even though I have these thoughts every time I buy a product created by this booming garment industry, I normally burry them somewhere deep down this dusty basket case called consciousness and head for the counter. This is a term called a “compassion fatigue” (to put it simply: the Stress of Caring Too Much – no joking here this is a serious contemporary syndrome but I would dedicate a post to this curious phenomenon some other time). Interestingly, I came across a book that had a chapter on this very topic – poor Bangladeshi women working in the garment industry- and apparently I was right and I was wrong. Yes indeed –they are paid little; yes indeed – they are treated like dogs. But may be there is another side of the coin. If you have time and want to read something interesting from the catalogue of this big bad world of ours take a look at this excerpt.

Sachs, Jeffry. D, “The End of Poverty: Economic possibilities of our time”, Chapter 1: A global family portrait, page 26-30, Penguin Group Inc, New York, 2005

“Bangladesh was born in a war for independence against Pakistan in 1971. That year, it experienced massive famine and disarray, leading an official in Henry Kissinger's State Department to famously label it an "international basket case." Bangladesh today is far from a basket case. Per capita income has approximately doubled since independence. Life expectancy has risen from forty-four years to sixty-two years. The infant mortality rate (the number of children who die before their first birthday for every 1,000 born) has declined from 145 in 1970 to 48 in 2002. Bangladesh shows us that even in circumstances that seem the most hopeless there are ways forward if the right strategies are applied, and if the right combination of investments is made.

Still, Bangladesh is not out of the grip of extreme poverty. Although it has escaped the worst of the ravages of famine and disease in the past generation, it faces some profound challenges today. A few months after my visit to Malawi, I was up at dawn one morning in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to see a remarkable sight: thousands of people walking to work in long lines stretching from the outskirts of Dhaka and from some of its poorest

neighborhoods. Looking more closely, I noticed that these workers were almost all young women, perhaps between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. These are the workers of a burgeoning garment industry in Dhaka who cut, stitch, and package millions of pieces of apparel each month for shipment to the United States and Europe. Over the years, I have visited garment factories all over the developing world. I have grown familiar with the cavernous halls where hundreds of young women sit at sewing machines, and men at cutting tables, where the fabrics move along production lines and the familiar labels of GAP, Polo, Yves Saint Laurent, Wal-Mart, J. C. Penney, and others are attached as the clothing reaches the final stages of production. There is nothing glamorous about this work. The women often walk two hours each morning in long quiet files to get to work. Arriving at seven or seven-thirty, they may be in their seats for most of the following twelve hours. They often work with almost no break at all or perhaps a very short lunch break, with little chance to go to the lavatory. Leering bosses lean over them, posing a threat of sexual harassment. After a long, difficult, tedious day, the young women trudge back home, when they are again sometimes threatened with physical assault. These sweatshop jobs are the targets of public protest in developed countries; those protests have helped to improve the safety and quality of the working conditions. The rich-world protesters, however, should support increased numbers of such jobs, albeit under safer working conditions, by protesting the trade protectionism in their own countries that keeps out garment exports from countries such as Bangladesh. These young women already have a foothold in the modern economy that is a critical, measurable step up from the villages of Malawi (and more relevant for the women, a step up from the villages of Bangladesh where most of them were born). The sweatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of extreme poverty. They give lie to the Kissingerstate department's forecast that Bangladesh is condemned to extreme poverty.

On one visit to Bangladesh, I picked up an English-language morning newspaper, where I found an extensive insert of interviews with young women working in the garment sector. These stories were poignant, fascinating, and eye-opening. One by one, they recounted the arduous hours, the lack of labor rights, and the harassment. What was most striking and unexpected about the stories was the repeated affirmation that this work was the greatest opportunity that these women could ever have imagined, and that their employment had changed their lives for the better. Nearly all of the women interviewed had grown up in the countryside, extraordinarily poor, illiterate and unschooled, and vulnerable to chronic hunger and hardship in a domineering, patriarchal society. Had they (and their forebearers of the 1970s and 1980s) stayed in the villages, they would have been forced into a marriage arranged by their fathers, and by seventeen or eighteen, forced to conceive a child. Their trek to the cities to take jobs has given these young women a chance for personal liberation of unprecedented dimension and opportunity. The Bangladeshi women told how they were able to save some small surplus from their meager pay, manage their own income, have their own rooms, choose when and whom to date and marry, choose to have children when they felt ready, and use their savings to improve their living conditions and especially to go back to school to enhance their literacy and job-market skills.

As hard as it is, this life is a step on the way to economic opportunity that was unimaginable in the countryside in generations past. Some rich-country protesters have argued that Dhaka's apparel firms should either pay far higher wage rates or be closed, but closing such factories as a result of wages forced above worker productivity would be little more than a ticket for these women back to rural misery. For these young women, these factories offer not only opportunities for personal

freedom, but also the first rung on the ladder of rising skills and income for themselves and, within a few years, for their children. Virtually every poor country that has developed successfully has gone through these first stages of industrialization. These Bangladeshi women share the experience of many generations of immigrants to New York City's garment district and a hundred other places where their migration to toil in garment factories was a step on the path to a future of urban affluence in succeeding generations. Not only is the garment sector fueling Bangladesh's economic growth of more than 5 percent per year in recent years, but it is also raisingthe consciousness and power of women in a society that was long brazenly biased against women's chances in life.

As part of a more general and dramatic process of change throughout Bangladeshi society, this change and others give Bangladesh the opportunity in the next few years to put itself on a secure path of long-term economic growth. The countryside that these women have left is also changing quickly, in part because of the income remittances and ideas that the young women send back to their rural communities, and in part because of the increased travel and temporary migration between rural and urban areas, as families diversify their economic bases between rural agriculture and urban manufacturers and services. In 2003, my colleagues at Columbia and I visited a village near Dhaka with one of the leaders of an inspiring nongovernmental organization, the Bangladeshi Rural Advancement Committee, now known universally as BRAC. There we met representatives from a village association, which BRAC had helped to organize, in which women living about an hour outside the city were engaged in small-scale commercial activities— food processing and trade—within the village and on the roads between the village and Dhaka itself. These women presented a picture of change every bit as dramatic as that of the burgeoning apparel sector.
Wearing beautiful saris, the women sat on the ground in six rows, each with six women, to greet us and answer questions. Each row represented a subgroup of the local "microfinance" unit. The woman in the front of the row was in charge of the borrowing of the whole group behindher. The group in each line was mutually responsible for repayments of the loans taken by any member within the line. BRAC and its famed counterpart, Grameen Bank, pioneered this kind of group lending, in which impoverished recipients (usually women) are given small loans of a few hundred dollars as working-capital for microbusiness activities. Such women were long considered unbankable, simply not creditworthy enough to bear the transaction costs to receive loans. Group lending changed the repayment dynamics: default rates are extremely low, and BRAC and Grameen have figured out how to keep other transaction costs to a minimum as well. Perhaps more amazing than the stories of how microfinance was fueling small-scale businesses were the women's attitudes to child rearing.

When Dr. Allan Rosenfield, dean of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and one of the world's leading experts on reproductive health, asked the women how many had five children, no hands went up. Four? Still no hands. Three? One nervous woman, looking around, reluctantly put her hand in the air. Two? About 40 percent of the women. One? Perhaps another 25 percent. None? The remainder of the women. Here was a group where the average number of children for these mothers was between one and two children. Rosenfield then asked them how many they wanted in total. He again started at five—no hands. Four? No hands. Three? No hands. Two? Almost all the hands went up. This social norm was new, a demonstration of a change of outlook and possibility so dramatic that Rosenfield dwelt on it throughout the rest of our visit. He had been visiting Bangladesh and other parts of Asia since the 1960s, and he remembered vividly the days when Bangladeshi rural women would typically have had six or seven children.

The jobs for women in the cities and in rural off-farm microenterprises; a new spirit of women's rights and independence and empowerment; dramatically reduced rates of child mortality; rising literacy of girls and young women; and, crucially, the availability of family planning and contraception have made all the difference for these women.

There is no single explanation for the dramatic, indeed historic, reduction in desired rates of fertility: it is the combination of new ideas, better public health for mothers and children, and improved economic opportunities for women. The reduced fertility rates, in turn, will fuel Bangladesh's rising incomes. With fewer children, a poor household can invest more in the health and education of each child, thereby equipping the next generation with the health, nutrition, and education that can lift Bangladesh's living standards in future years. Bangladesh has managed to place its foot on the first rung of the ladder of development, and has achieved economic growth and improvements of health and education partly through its own heroic efforts, partly through the ingenuity of NGOs like BRAC and Grameen Bank, and partly through investments that have been made, often at significant scale, by various donor governments that rightly viewed Bangladesh not as a hopeless basket case but as a country worthy of attention, care, and development assistance.”


(And still somewhere deep inside the above-mentioned basket case I know it all just stinks of hypocricy and desperation)