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Why We Don’t Teach People to Fish
By John Coonrod “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” – Chinese Proverb This proverb leaps to mind whenever we think of efforts to end hunger. Yet it is surprisingly and dangerously misleading. Most of the hungriest parts…
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Commentary: The Asian Enigma
By Vulimiri Ramalingaswami, Urban Jonsson and Jon Rohde In the public imagination, the home of the malnourished child is sub-Saharan Africa. But the league tables clearly show that the worst-affected region is not Africa but South Asia. Just over 30% of Africa’s children are underweight, but the corresponding figure for South Asia is over 50%. And…
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Ending Hunger and the New Human Agenda
Introduction Recently, the spotlight of world attention was on the Beijing Women’s Conference. Earlier it was on the Social Summit in Copenhagen and the population conference in Cairo. What has almost completely escaped public recognition is that these conferences were not isolated events, representing the voices of certain special interests. What has emerged in the…
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What constitutes an enabling environment for the poor to succeed in their own development?
Working paper for a National Strategy Forum, April 1994, Dhaka, Bangladesh Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework that will facilitate the participants in the upcoming strategic forum to identify new openings for action to provide an enabling environment for the poor. As will be shown below, the lack of a…