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Multidimensional poverty in Guyana

Nov 08, 2021 Editorial

Kaieteur News- Call it whatever pleases: a concentration of crises at the original people level. Or a state of chronic problems that hangs on, and intensifies with the passage of time. Or a way of life experienced that afflicts and condemns to a terrible existence. Whatever and however it is described, multidimensional poverty is nothing short of a catastrophe for a section of the population of Guyana (“Poverty index reveals stark inequalities among ethnic groups -UNDP -in 2019, 51,000 people in Guyana were classified as vulnerable to multidimensional poverty” (KN October 17).
That number refers almost exclusively to Guyana’s indigenous population.
This Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), the handiwork of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in conjunction with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Index (OPHI), revealed something that Guyanese have always known in some casual offhand fashion. It is that our native-born people in the hinterlands are at the bottom of the economic ladder, what the UNDP called “multidimensional poverty.” We at this paper translate that to what it really means for those living in such conditions. It is abject human misery.
According to the KN article, in Guyana, “Amerindians account for 10.51 percent of the population, but represent 63 percent of the multidimensional poor.” If we were to use an approximate population range of 750,000 to 800,000 Guyanese, that means there are about 81,000 to 85,000 Amerindians in our population. And if the Amerindian population “represent 63 percent of the multidimensional poor” in this country, then there are around five out of every eight who live in the darkness of deep and prolonged human misery. This is on an ongoing basis, with little by way of substantive relief on the horizon.
As measured in the study by UNDP and OPHI, there are many basic areas where chronic deprivations are the norm. Among these in no particular order are water, sanitation, lack of schooling, undernourishment, substandard housing, and likelihood of victimisation from partner violence. They form part and parcel of such a dreary and desperation-filled existence. To select a few of those areas at random, girls are deprived of schooling, men do a little better, but that’s it; people don’t have enough food for daily consumption; and basics such as water and sanitation are largely not at any robust level. Unsurprisingly, females, both younger and older, experience the brunt of the effects of this kind of poverty and misery.
All of this is painful in reminding us of the grim conditions in which Amerindian brothers and sisters, Guyanese citizens are compelled to live. It is more like scratching out an existence in a succession of endless unchanging days. The piercing irony of all this is that all of our top people, from political leaders to senior public officers, love to share how much they have done for this stricken segment of Guyana’s population, and how the other side did not. How much they care and spent and gave, while the other group did nothing.
While this regular deluge of garbage is being fed to the Amerindian population as the main target audience, and with the larger Guyanese citizenry on a more generalised footing, the local native-born, our original citizens, languish in deep and enduring poverty. In the meantime, the main ingredients for a reasonable quality of life are most pronounced by their acute absence. Indeed, huge sums of money have been doled out from time to time by one government or the other. But we at this paper would assert that it is not to lift their standard of living, but to take advantage of these poor folk with the sole objective of gaining their votes at election time.
Plain and simple, they are election fodder, part of the power equation, due to them being a visible and manipulable swing voting bloc. Cash and projects go to selected people, and do not trickle down to the wider native population. They are a convenience, with no political objectives for alleviating their impoverishment, or empowering them to lift themselves up out of the gutters. Thus, our Amerindian citizens are used, misused and abused. And all the while, they live with the harrowing day-to-day realities of multidimensional poverty, aka terrible human misery.

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