The Health-Based Poverty Trap

Hey everyone! It’s been a while since I last posted! Today we are going to shift from food to another related idea: health.

Of the 9 million children who die before their fifth birthdays each year, the majority comes from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. One in five dies from diarrhea, and dehydration is the main cause, so the rehydration solution ORS can prevent it.

However, only 10 percent of families actually use it. The problem is that many of these “low-hanging fruit” remain unpicked. The poor do care about health, but they spend the money elsewhere, not on these cheap and effective technologies. 

Health certainly has the potential to be a source of a number of different traps

Workers living in a n insalubrious environment may miss workdays, and children who are sick may be unable to do well in school. These are examples of channels that can be a potential mechanism for current misfortunes to turn into future poverty

A large proportion of the world’s poorest people are stuck in a health-based poverty trap, and we need one push to set the trap loose.

Sachs’s book “The End of Poverty” refers to the S-shaped curve in chapter one  . 

On the left part of the curve, African countries where malaria is endemic are stuck there, as the labor force is too unproductive. Hence, they are too poor to be able to pay for malaria eradication

However, if we had one push — if someone did them the favor of financing malaria eradication, they would end up on the right part of the curve and on the road to prosperity. 

This is what the activists think, but there are always skeptics who believe it is because the government is weak. You don’t know whether malaria is making the malaria-infected countries poor — perhaps they can’t eradicate malaria since they are poorly governed, then the mere eradication of malaria may achieve very little as the governance remains weak.

Experts agree that access to piped water and sanitation can have a dramatic impact on health, and piping uncontaminated and chlorinated water to households can possibly reduce diarrhea by up to 95 percent. 

While the conventional wisdom is that providing piped water and sanitation is too expensive for the budget of most developing countries. However, there are many cheap ways to avert diarrhea, including adding chlorine to water and using inexpensive medical or public health technologies. 

We have health-based poverty traps, but we also have ladders that we can give to the poor to help them escape from these traps. If the poor couldn’t afford these ladders, the rest of the world should help them out. 

Tomorrow we will explore why the “low-hanging fruit” or poor health technologies aren’t used anymore!