Dealing with Intergenerational Poverty in Malawi

 

Intergenerational Poverty in Malawi

We can argue that, quite a number of today’s poor children will become tomorrow’s poor adults. Why? Inheritance is of the most common means by which physical property is transferred from one generation to another in Malawi. However, the design of living for poor Malawians is not necessarily passed on from one generation to the next. Poverty is often associated in people’s minds with misery, but for us who are familiar with rural Malawi will understand that poor families accept their slice of poverty with courage and cheer just like in most developing countries. 

In Malawi, there are families, who are rich today, and yet they come from poor backgrounds. This upward movement, therefore, indicates that the poor in Malawi are capable of taking full advantage of changing circumstances and greater opportunity.

It is important for us to understand that poverty hits children the hardest and threatens their most basic rights to survival, health and nutrition, education and protection from harm and exploitation. The poor are vulnerable to a quite a number of shocks and hazards. These include droughts, floods and storms, and man-made hazards such as economic shocks. Malawi’s dependence on rain-fed agriculture makes the country particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. All these combined have a negative wave on the development of children in the country.

 

Sustainable Interventions

 A lot of inequalities still exist among children in Malawi despite a lot of efforts to curb the same. Without decisive steps to break the cycle of poverty, millions of children are disadvantaged. There are however, some ways for Malawi to escape childhood and intergenerational poverty.

If strategies for combating child poverty in the country are not at the center of interventions, the upshot is that, a rapidly increasing number of the country’s children will be born into a country registering the slowest pace of poverty reduction hence making it hard for Malawi to end extreme poverty in a generation. 

We can all agree today that Education is at the heart of development and is the most effective way to eradicating child poverty in Malawi. Adequate investment in Education is therefore, vital. There is need for Malawi to deliver on true free and equal access to education for all poor children- children living in remote rural areas, children from marginalized groups and children with disabilities. Rural communities especially, require interventions that will help them gain some form of economic security; by providing access of skills and knowledge to poor people which will help them secure a livelihood, and support their families so as to escape intergenerational poverty.