The plight of the five boys who were left alone at Vive La Force while their parents went in search of work has attracted much attention and rightly so. Under no circumstance should the children - the eldest being 13 - be left by both parents for weeks to fend for themselves. As it turned out, the 13-year-old manfully grappled with the task of taking care of his siblings and finding food for them which entailed fishing in the Demerara River with a dilapidated net. However, the day-to-day challenges were clearly beyond their youthful capabilities and moreover they would not have been attending school. Following the reportage on the plight of the boys, the mother has returned and taken the children to Moblissa where the father has secured a job as a gardener.
It is easy to pass judgement on the parents but perhaps there is a more fundamental issue at stake. In our letter columns there have been heated disputes recently about the real level of poverty in the country and where it was in 1992 and whether it had fallen dramatically or slightly. What is certainly not in dispute in the Ramdeen case is that this family and many others across the country live in abject poverty and are hardly being reached by those agencies and policies meant to alleviate their penury. The parents and their nine children - ranging in age from 7 months to 13 years - eke out a desperate existence in a shack on a sliver of land near a koker. The father's lack of work in the out-of-crop sugar season caused him to have to journey to Linden in search of a job thereby splitting his family.
If one were to read the Guyana Poverty Reduction Strategy Progress Report 2004, there is very little reference to mapping poverty and seeking out the immiserised and neediest families like the Ramdeens. The most direct reference in the report would be where it deals with `Social Safety Nets' wherein it is stated that the Ministry of Labour, Human Services and Social Security "is undertaking an analysis of the profile and needs of target populations affected by sector restructuring. This analysis will serve as the basis for developing social safety net options to mitigate the potentially adverse impact of expected retrenchment on vulnerable groups and design of retrenchment packages and labour market and training programmes for retrenched workers." Even here the emphasis is on the impact of restructuring on vulnerable groups and retrenchment packages. The Ramdeens are a vulnerable family and have been so for many years yet they seemed to have completely escaped the periscope of the Ministry of Human Services. To its credit the charity Food for the Poor had discovered this family and assisted it over a two-year period. This must show that through community visits and information gathering it is possible to find out where these families living in stark poverty are. The ministry should follow this methodology.
In the main, the poverty reduction strategy progress report seems wedded to the concept of a macroeconomic, top down approach to the reduction of poverty through general job creation. The breadwinner of the Ramdeen family is under-employed by virtue of being a seasonal worker and there is no immediate prospect of improved employment opportunities for him. Ideally he should be trained to improve his marketability but that doesn't seem likely. So as of now the poverty strategy means nothing to the Ramdeens.
Furthermore, agencies like the Social Impact Amelioration Programme (SIMAP) have recently focused mainly on infrastructural projects to improve, in theory, conditions for residents of whole communities. For instance, this year SIMAP will be undertaking 200 projects in all ten regions based on its Rapid Poverty Assessment conducted in 2003. These projects cover farm-to-market roads, residential roads, repairing of educational facilities, construction of 30 multi-purpose centres in poor communities, rehabilitation of 30 rural drainage and irrigation systems along with other multi-sector projects which cover bridges, abattoirs etc. These are unlikely to directly benefit the Ramdeens.
The poverty reduction strategy report also identifies the ministries of human services, education and housing as pivotal intermediaries in reducing poverty but prior to the publication of the Stabroek News stories none of these ministries had intervened meaningfully in the family's crisis. The Ramdeens have no house lot though they would certainly qualify under the criteria set. No education official sounded the alarm bell that five or six school-age children were not attending school regularly because of their poverty or poor family circumstances and the human services ministry had not extended its facilities to the family. Yet there is this paragraph in the progress report "the government is also undertaking a social safety net diagnosis of the school feeding programme in order to increase its coverage and efficiency and possible decentralisation. In addition, social safety net options for vulnerable groups are being reviewed with the view of targeting populations affected by sector restructuring." Whatever the early warning systems that were envisaged in the poverty reduction strategy these are not working and need to be fixed.
Families like the Ramdeens continue to fall through the safety net and only considered and detailed mapping of these families will lead to any improvement in their circumstances. This is what the government through the Ministry of Human Services and SIMAP should be tackling: finding these families and sticking with them.
It must be said that even with the best systems in place some of these families will be difficult to help. The parents often lack basic parenting skills, frustration carved by brutal living and no hope has set in and circumstances conspire against any change. Food for the Poor tried but found that the parents were not making a serious effort to improve their circumstances. There are numerous NGOs out there operating in cushy offices and convening seminars in the air-conditioned recesses of city hotels which should be going into the field and helping families like the Ramdeens no matter the hurdles and setbacks.
A poverty reduction strategy means little if it is not addressing the plight of families mired in years of impoverishment and deprivation.