Social Policy in Developing Countries

Arthur Livingstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415601856
• eBook ISBN: 9781136857065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Economics

This reissue, first published in 1969, is a study of contemporary social policy in developing countries, which places the emphasis upon the human needs and requirements for social change which confront any people and any government, wherever their political and international affiliations lie, whatever their economic and social convictions may be.

    1
Introduction

In Islamic teaching one instruction forbids the devout Moslem to sleep in peace if at sundown there exists one hungry person within his range of vision. Other religions lay a similar personal and social obligation on their adherents. Taken literally, throughout the world, this observance would induce a chronic insomnia of epidemic proportions. Periodically, dramatic news headlines describe widespread starvation in countries beset by famine and other calamities. As serious, if not more so, is the constant condition of millions of the earth’s inhabitants where the insidious effects of prolonged malnutrition and untreated sickness leave them only a half life within the brain. The consequences, in terms of human debility and apathy, are as significant for the prospects of national development as they are tragic for the personal destinies of over two thousand million people living now in under-developed countries—70% of the human race.

The lack of any educational opportunity for many millions of people, and probably for their children’s children, heightens their already perilous condition. There exist today more than seven hundred million adult illiterates, representing about half of the world adult population, a deprived group whose numbers are increasing every year. Taking one of the most extreme contrasts given in the Overseas Development Institute Publication, World III (Macmillan, 1964): In 1960, 9% of the Sudanese school-age population was enrolled in primary and secondary schools, compared with 80-81% in the U.K. and the U.S.A., enrolment in higher education at that time was thirty-four per one hundred thousand of population in the Sudan, compared with four hundred and two in the U.K. and one thousand nine hundred and eighty-three in the U.S.A.

This is only part of the problem; millions more suffer a brief and irrelevant education that provides little hope of personal advancement or a contribution to the development of their country. In rural areas they are found working in penurious and non-progressive agricultural occupations; in cities and towns they crowd in shanty fringes seeking the regular cash wages in industry and commerce. In many cases, over-population imposes an unbearable strain on countries with slender resources of material wealth and technical competence; sometimes a country is too small in geographical area and population ever to provide a viable economic unit. The future discovery of oil deposits or some such miracle may be the dream that holds at bay an annihilating sense of despair. Large or small, the developing countries contain that half of the world’s population which earns only 7% of the world’s income; a quarter of the world population, found in Europe and North America earns nearly three-quarters of the world’s income (Macmillan, 1964).

A number of other indigenous factors may aggravate a state of endemic poverty: political instability and capricious political leadership; rigid social classifications and economic disparities; traditional attitudes inducing inertia and resistance to change and modernization; destructive civil or extraterritorial warfare; catastrophes of flood, earthquake and drought. As general information, most of this depressing picture is known to people throughout the world who read newspapers, listen to the radio and watch television, and travel outside the modern watering places. To understand the full implications of the problem, both for those who suffer from it and for those outside it, something more is necessary than the grim evidence of statistics and eyewitness reports of human suffering. Acknowledging the risks that attend the generalization of such a wide range of problems, with a possible over-simplification of the issues involved, it is important to look more closely at conditions which create for many millions of people in the world today an inescapable human predicament. Basically the predicament is the hopelessness of the man and the family caught in a net of poverty, ignorance and disease. In the industrialized countries, whatever the memories of the economic depression of the second quarter of this century, however bitter the experience of destructive wars, despite the hazards represented by the recurrent financial crises of the present day, such societies are not only becoming increasingly affluent but offer rich rewards for the application of intelligence and personal industry. In many other countries, as they are politically, culturally and economically conditioned today, the human attributes of hard work, thrift, imagination, and perseverance have only limited relevance to either the problems endemic to the society or to the measures required to solve them.

The greater part of the population of Asian, African, Middle Eastern and South American countries are engaged in agricultural work, sometimes as many as 90% of the people in any one country. In the 1950’s, India, Thailand and the Sudan (to quote only three countries of many with similar conditions) had between 70% and 90% of their total population dependent on agriculture, compared with 3% in the U.K. and 13% in the U.S.A. (Moyes & Hayter, 1964). So often this agricultural work is an unrelenting struggle for mere survival, but even then survival only to an age which in most developed countries represents the early years of a personal career. For the peasant-owner, renter, or neo serf of his land, the struggle is against many enemies of the body and of the soul: barren soil, fragmented land ownings, landlord despotism, crippling indebtedness to the money lender, the devastation of drought and flood, archaic farm equipment, primitive methods of transport and communication, inadequate markets, lack of either formal education or technical skills, and, overall, no expectation for oneself or one’s children of being able to reach beyond the harsh and repetitive toil that brings no increase in the products of the land or the fortunes of the family.

From this catalogue of human woes there might easily emerge the outline of an agricultural man who was largely an automaton, moving in a zombie-like trance through the vicissitudes that assail him from every side. This is far from the truth. Rural peoples in very impoverished circumstances live by a rich store of legend and tradition. Family and community life is enlivened by the festivals that mark the significant events in their personal and group associations. A pervasive tang of humour may be only faintly discernible to the outsider. That which is so often exasperating to the activist—the apathy, the sense of resignation to the inevitable, the resistance to change—is the product of generations of last ditch battles with an implacable environment and the interior weaknesses of ignorance and a lack of hope. Against such a background, exhortations on the fruits of hard work, thrift and co-operation are met with the cynicism they no doubt deserve. Both the social and the technological barriers to real change are formidable indeed. Despite decades of effort and some encouraging achievements, few governments, or the international organizations advising them, have been able to develop a progressive agricultural economy. Typical of comparable figures for other kinds of agricultural products is the 1961-2 contrast between the annual wheat yield in developing countries (an average of 7 cwt. an acre) and that of other countries (28 cwt. an acre in the U.K., 33 cwt. an acre in Denmark). Not the least problem for governments in low income countries is the recognition that agricultural development is an international as well as a domestic issue for them, bound up with the readiness of other countries to accord them favourable terms of trade, and with the availability of international loans at interest rates that do not cripple the country’s rate of progress.

In the present decade we have become familiar with the recurrent warnings of the Food and Agricultural Organization and other international bodies about deteriorating food supplies in, or for, low income countries, the constant threat of famine in some regions, and the general inability to find a remedy for the increasing gap between the rate of economic and social development in the more affluent nations and that achieved by countries which carry the greater proportion of the world’s population. Obviously, the problem is wider than that concerned with agricultural production. But in most developing countries a high proportion of the national product, and of the working population, is related to agriculture. All the more imperative that increased attention be given to a domestic and international problem that continues to baffle us.

In developing countries, as in most other parts of the world, cities and towns are attracting people from villages and farms, drawn by the prospects of regular work and cash wages. Large numbers of these migrants are men who come alone, arranging for part of their wages to be sent regularly to the rural families they have left behind. Many will return home at least once a year, at harvest time. Alone or with families they will live for most of the year in makeshift dwellings on the edge of the towns or cities, frequently without fresh water supplies or sanitary provisions, and almost certainly with no access to competent medical care or to regular education for their children. A sobering reflection that these plague-risk slums and the menial jobs of their occupants are by them thought preferable to what they left behind in the rural areas.

A large influx of rural people to urban areas produces an insupportable burden for both the individual and the country as a whole. Some years ago, as part of a national industrial development plan, one government in a country of nearly 50 million people sought to attract rural dwellers for factory work in the capital city. Contracts were arranged for nine months’ employment periods to the industry, the other three months to be spent at home during the crucial part of the agricultural year. Concrete cubicles were erected in the city to accommodate the male workers who would spend the nine months’ period separated from their families. The scheme had been implemented only a short while before many disturbing habits and attitudes became evident among a considerable section of the work group. Chronic absenteeism, alcoholism (in a country with legal prohibition), delinquency, venereal disease, mental illness—these were the more dramatic forms of a general malaise amongst these new industrial workers. Production broke down, and the Government hurried to establish a Committee of Inquiry. There was nothing startlingly novel about its findings but they were of important significance for this and other occasions where people are moved from one subculture to another. Separation from the carefully defined relationships of an extended family system in a rural society; accommodation in the intimidating bleakness of a concrete cubicle; the demands of an unfamiliar repetitive task for several hours a day without interruption; a regular acquisition of money with so many incitements to spend it and so few of the traditional restraints to curb the spendthrift: these were the experiences to engender loneliness and a personal disorientation. A broad range of issues concerned with the social consequences of technological change is to be found in a University of Dacca Survey (Human and Social Impact, etc., 1956).

This then is the human situation in many countries, of many millions of population: rural families eking out an existence that seems not far removed from that of the cave dweller; urban inhabitants whose work is so often trivial, parasitic. Such people, and their governments, are caught in a familiar vicious circle. They lack the national resources to provide jobs with adequate wages and prospects for the future, houses that offer space and dignity in personal living, educational facilities for children both in the appreciation of knowledge and the development of technical skills, health services that can bring children into the world potentially fit for a full and vigorous life. Without these economic and social achievements, a country cannot hope to improve its levels of living. Human beings are vital economic resources. They are both the ends and the means of national planning. Where crippled mentally, physically and emotionally, they provide a stubborn obstacle to the fulfilment of even the most imaginative plans for national development. The dimensions of this obstacle, and what might be done to remove it, can perhaps better be understood by looking at three major human needs in impoverished countries—education, health, and social welfare. These three areas of need do not represent the sum of individual or national requirements but they mirror both the nature of the distress and what hope exists of relieving it.

2
Education

In many countries whose poverty and general under-development is the subject of this examination, there is a curious ambivalence towards education and the educator. Along with an almost obsessive striving for the status that education can offer goes a resistance to the application of knowledge in circumstances where it is most desperately needed. In some developing countries, the resistance to technological innovation may come not from the un-enlightened peasantry but from an educated elite who fear its threat to an established way of life. One Secretary of Education, administratively responsible for the schools programme of millions of children in a subsistence economy, resolutely held out for years against the inclusion of technical subjects in the curricula. Often there is veneration of the sage with a repudiation of the influence his wisdom represents. Students reading their own public odes to some philosopher-father may be members of a clandestine group dedicated to deposing him. To attach semantic labels such as hypocrisy or insincerity to those attitudes and behaviour patterns is over-simplification, a superficial reading of what is at stake. One of the central issues for a society is the particular kind of value it places on knowledge and its application to assisting human need. It is at this point that we may encounter some of the most frustrating impediments to social progress.

It seems obvious that if a country is to acquire the accumulation of knowledge necessary for integrated development there must be a social climate favourable to two types of human activity. First, exercise of the free rein of the imagination in searching for and experimenting with new ideas; secondly, the participation of people at all educational and economic levels in the quest for increased knowledge and skill. In many parts of the world one or both of these prerequisites are absent. The nature of certain traditions, economic structures, and political systems stifle the inducement to individual enterprise and the capacity for innovation. Such restrictive influences represent one of the major obstacles to social development.

Continuously, every society is confronted with the problem of balancing permissiveness for individual expression with the social obligations binding on a person as a member of a group. This issue has particular urgency for under-developed countries. Their need for entrepreneurs is paramount in every vocational and commercial field. The slow development of entrepreneurial activity in many countries stems from many limiting circumstances, most of them understandable and, in the near future, not easily reducible. One serious limitation is a social structure that does not readily permit change. Traditional attitudes and practices, whether based on religious beliefs or largely on the sanctity of custom, can frustrate the assimilation of new knowledge and its application to the urgencies of economic and social need. Both international consultants and indigenous leaders working with technical assistance programmes know how arduous and slow-moving is the task of introducing unfamiliar concepts and techniques to a society which must appropriate them if it is to progress but may believe itself to be threatened with cultural disintegration by accepting ‘modern’ ideas and methods. This can be a problem at any level of economic and social organization. In one Moslem country university studies of social planning techniques were attacked as a secular threat to the divine dispensation of human affairs. This resistance to alien ideas erupted dramatically in a strong opposition to organized relief for the victims of widespread flood devastation; a programme which, man-made, was seen as a challenge to the will of Allah for his creatures. There is ample illustration of similar resistance to progressive planning in Christian communities.

The particular economic structure of a country may provide another barrier to the acceptance and diffusion of new knowledge. To take one of the most obvious examples : where an agricultural system is based on a system of large landlord estates, the peasants achieving little more than a subsistence level of living, for whom are new ideas important or relevant? In other circumstances, where the land, fragmented through the operation of certain inheritance laws is not economically viable, the contribution of modern science and techniques to agricultural improvement seem just as meaningless. Some recent writers claim that, under these conditions of agricultural malaise, there is little point in talking about ‘land reform’. Only a substantial political and social revolution can provide for either a renovation of the agricultural system or the opportunities for applying modern scientific and technical knowledge to the immediate requirements of the country. Whether reform or revolution is the remedy for a particular society, there is little doubt that in many countries of the world at the present time the prevailing economic structure mocks the attempts to introduce fresh ways of thinking and working.

The constant tensions of political leadership in developing countries make understandable, if not always tolerable, the restrictions on individual initiative. In a private conversation, one African political leader stated the position very simply, ‘In the earlier tribal groups from which our nation emerged, there could be no opposition to the Chief. Or if there was, it was punishable by death or social expulsion. You cannot expect the leaders of such a new country as this to tolerate quickly the rivalry of other political groups’. Even outside the immediate political arena, deviant opinions about current or prospective activities of the government may be seen as a threat to both the personal power of the leadership and the stability of the nation. Governments vary in the extent to which they possess either the power or the will to suppress such discordant views. But either by direct repressive measures or by giving no encouragement to dissentient opinion, the political authority may maintain a social atmosphere in which novel ideas and innovative practices find no room to flourish. The consequences for national development can be disastrous.

It would be a misrepresentation of current affairs to imply that progress in all developing countries is stifled by the various exigencies mentioned above. To the contrary, some such countries have shown remarkable capacity for assimilating new ideas and for forging novel measures to give substance to new ideas within the educational field. Students in some developing countries have access to a range of knowledge, and participate in educational techniques, that are as yet largely unknown to students of many affluent societies. The syllabus of many a professional training programme in an African, Asian or Latin American country contains a crystallization of modern ideas and practices from many parts of the world; this comprehensive fusion of knowledge and techniques is not always available to the student of an ‘advanced’ country where traditional academic requirements often limit the scope of a student’s experience.

True, these educational measures are often accelerated to excess and there may be cause for disquiet while visiting, in an impoverished country, as the writer once did, a higher educational establishment whose students are top-headed with radio antennae, observing one another through one-way vision screens, and communicating with their teachers by closed television circuits. However, the desire and the will is there to experiment. What is a graver cause for concern is the situation where the vested interests, the fears and sense of insecurity of political, economic or religious elites make suspect not only dissent but even the wish to experiment.

The concept and the use of knowledge in any society sets the boundaries for educational development but many other factors determine the direction and volume of educational achievement. Without any implication that the list is exhaustive, there are ten issues of major importance for educational strategy in developing countries.

Literacy

What steps can be taken to reduce or eliminate the high incidence of illiteracy in many countries? A United Nations Report reveals that at the middle of the twentieth century there were believed to be about seven hundred million adult illiterates, representing 44% of the total world population, of 15 years and over. Half the countries of the world registered 50% illiterate in their adult population. While in the last decade the proportion of illiterates in the world population has decreased, their numbers increase by about 30 million every year. The successful promotion of a development plan depends on the quality of human resources available as much as it does on the possession of material capital. Where a high proportion of these human resources are not only untrained in the specialized skills essential to development purposes but are wholly illiterate as well, planning objectives may be in serious jeopardy.

The problem is not merely one of finding adequate means to develop literacy in an impoverished country. More critical is the dilemma facing governments at present as to what part of an educational budget should be spent on literacy campaigns against the demands of formal educational expansion. This dilemma is heightened by the present lack of knowledge about the most effective measures for increasing literacy in developing countries. Certain examples there are of countries overtaking their illiteracy problem—Russia, Cuba, the Philippines, Southern Italy, Sardinia, and currently China are amongst these—but some of the most populous developin...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• General Editor’s Introduction
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Education
• 3 Health
• 4 Social welfare
• 5 The determinants of social policy
• 6 The instruments of social policy
• 7 Conclusion
• Further reading
• Bibliography