Dialogue: With resolve we can win battle against poverty

Retiring World Vision executive director COLIN PRENTICE says he will leave the agency confident that the war on want is being won.

There is a story - probably apocryphal - of a ritish newspaper which decided it would print only good news.

Within six months the paper collapsed; nobody wanted to buy it. The moral of the story is that people may moan about all the bad stuff in the papers but bad news sells.

Certainly our preoccupation with the dark side of life is irksome at times but we shouldn't complain about it too much. It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. It's the preoccupation with the problems in our society that provides the drive to put them right.

Nowhere is this more evident than to aid agencies such as World Vision which depend heavily on media exposure of world crises to prompt donations.

But there is a downside. As the news switches from one human misery to another - famine, war, floods, tidal waves, earthquakes and back to famine again - it's easy to get the impression nothing changes.

Millions of dollars are poured into aid yet the requests continue. In "aid-speak," this is called compassion fatigue. Even the most well-meaning and generous can become disillusioned and give up.

Given that I am leaving World Vision, after six and a half years at the helm, some might conclude I'm suffering from the same bug.

Far from it. I leave confident that the battle against material poverty, for instance, is being won on every front.

I would go further. Material poverty - in the sense that people lack the basics to survive - can be wiped out within this century.

A big call? Maybe. But all the world's major problems have looked insurmountable before they were successfully tackled. There are people alive today who would once have flatly denied that men would one day walk on the moon.

And who would have thought the seemingly impregnable Soviet empire - grey, menacing and vast - would topple as it did? One minute there was a minor industrial dispute in a Polish shipyard and the next the Iron Curtain came crashing down.

That is not to say progress is easily accomplished. When William Wilberforce first presented his motion to the British Parliament to abolish slavery, it was roundly defeated.

Undeterred, he presented the same motion every year for the next 18 years. A hostile public did not put him off, vested interests did not put him off, a lot of flannel from economists about the necessity of the trade did not put him off. He knew slavery was evil. He knew it could be stopped.

On July 29, 1833, just days before Wilberforce died, slavery was abolished in all British territories. Within a year, 800,000 slaves were set free.

Was Wilberforce nothing more than a hand-wringing do-gooder? Was he an impractical dreamer? Hardly.

Abject poverty in this world should be treated exactly as Wilberforce treated slavery. That children starve is plainly wrong. It can be stopped. The problem is not inevitable, it's not insurmountable.

What gives me this confidence? Let me offer a couple of statistics. In 1960, 35 per cent of people in the developing world had access to clean water; today, the figure is about 70 per cent. In 1960, 48 per cent of of children in the developing world had access to primary education; today, the figure is closer to 80 per cent.

When one considers the population of the world has just about doubled since 1960, these are impressive gains. And it's easy to produce similar figures to show dramatic improvements in other poverty indicators, such as infant mortality and access to primary healthcare.

The statistic relating to primary education is particularly encouraging. Illiteracy is a major bar to development. Teach people to read and they learn how to stop the transmission of disease, how to grow more food and how to protect their environment.

Teach them how to write and they can negotiate with local officials, draft letters to newspapers and make their voices heard.

It has been estimated that to substantially eliminate illiteracy in the world would cost about $9 billion a year for the next 10 years. That's peanuts when one considers the world annually spends about $800 billion on advertising alone.

Which brings me back to our preoccupation with bad news. Sure, let's highlight the bad things going on in the world but let's not allow ourselves to be persuaded that the situation is, therefore, hopeless. Keeping an eye on the broader picture helps us put the crisis of the moment in perspective.

For myself, the time is right for me to leave World Vision and return to my first love - education. I'm taking up a post at the University of Auckland.

I've seen some grim things as the executive director of the agency - the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda, orphans dying of Aids in Romania, and I stood at the Albanian border as desperate Kosovars fled a rampaging Serbian Army.

However, I'm far from discouraged. Poverty can be defeated in New Zealand and overseas, but the goal requires commitment and support. With real resolve we have the tiger by the tail.