Here to Help: NGOs Combating Poverty in Latin America by Eversole Robyn;

Author:Eversole, Robyn;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

OI's Transformational Development Model

The Premise

OI’s understanding of poverty is that it is human made and not a natural phenomenon. Human beings are not born poor but become poor as a result of economic, social, political, and belief systems that deprive some people of the opportunity to lead decent lives. OI believes that people are not poor because they lack ability or intelligence but because they lack opportunity.

Poverty manifests itself in the deprivation of external rights and opportunities by human-made production and distribution systems and structures that constrain other human beings from unleashing their internal potential to achieve meaningful goals for themselves and others in society. OI believes that lack of access to credit and financial services is one of the critical opportunities the poor are deprived of.

Poverty is a grim phenomenon with a crushing and crippling effect on its victims whom it subjects to marginalization, loss of confidence, self-hatred, and hopelessness. In the words of an OI client in Moldova, “Poverty is pain; it feels like a disease. It attacks a person not only materially but also morally. It eats away one’s dignity and drives one into total despair.”

OI started participating in the fight to alleviate poverty through the provision of credit and related financial training services to people who are poor. To date, OI has helped more than 1 million people to alleviate their poverty through the creation of employment and the generation of income. While recognizing that this is important and has to continue, OI argues that focusing on money generation is only one small part of finding the way out of poverty. The alleviation of poverty is not only about having but also about being and becoming. Life does not consist of possessions alone, and poverty is not only about lack or deprivation of material resources. It is also about powerlessness, gender inequality, corruption, dishonesty, greed, moral decay, fear, environmental degradation, and dependency.

Human beings are economic, social, political, spiritual, and emotional by nature. Economic intervention alone does not come anywhere near to addressing the complex issues people face in life. Helping people who are poor to get their daily bread is good, but what matters most is what happens to them as human beings. The alleviation of poverty requires, therefore, a whole-person development approach to tackle the issues of life holistically. This is OI’s basic premise for developing and applying the model of transformational development, or TD, because the model does just that.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.