The Quality of Life Around The Globe
Professor Marks raised a critical point in class by talking about the importance of urbanism and the right to adequate housing as a Human Right. But if we look at some places around the globe such as the Kibera slum located in Nairobi – (one of the most crowded places on earth,) we can see that the Kiberian population is living way below of what is considered habitable and human. As Pogge stated in his book World Poverty and Human Rights, “standards of living, in Africa and Europe for instance, would be approximately the same if Africa had never been colonized” (86). If not only that, the population has been seemingly neglected by the Kenyan Government who does not provide them with basic human rights. The Kenyan Government does not support the population or help them expand public services such as education and health care, many wonder how the population will ever receive economic support to reach a better quality of life? Amartya Sen suggests in his book Development as freedom that, “The quality of life can be vastly raised, despite low incomes, through an adequate program of social services” (49). In Nairobi, almost 70% of the population lives in slums. Kibera is a slum with more than 800 thousand inhabitants which make it the largest and poorest slum in Africa.
Socioeconomic rights such as that to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one’s family including food, clothing, housing, and medical care, are currently by far, the most frequently unfulfilled human rights (Pogge, 97). There is no governmental program that aims towards the regularization of the occupation of this large area near the center of Nairobi. Instead, the various housing programs developed by the Kenyan government have demonstrated in recent years, and inability to cope with local realities. In the book Planet of Slums, Mike Davis presents a statistic that shows that 57% of the slums of Nairobi belong to politicians and people that work for the Government. Sheds of about 19 square foot are purchased for about $160 (87). The population does not have clean water to drink, nor even proper sanitary bathroom facilities, so they have to use bags that later on are disposed into the stream that runs through much of the region. From this same place where they toss their own waste is where many people draw water to use at home. Kiberian people take a “shower” (I don’t even know if we can call that shower) on the streets, inside buckets, this is pretty common there. Since there is no public hospital nearby, whoever gets sick is forced to deal in small private clinics that operate there locally.
Not only in Africa, but if we look at other parts of the world, we can see that different populations are living in deprived condition. Even though China’s economy has been growing quite fast in past few years, parts of the population are still facing poverty and misery. As Pogge mentions, the economic situation in China is among one of the poorest in the world and it is still declining over the years (19). The population could be divided into two groups; in one side we have the rich and in the other side the poor. Because of the Capitalism, this second group is now subjected to subhuman conditions of life. In the field, hundreds of millions of workers live in inappropriate conditions and they have to eat worms in order to survive. In the city, workers are underemployed, or, if they are lucky they will get a job in a factory, and face journeys of 14 hours daily to earn very little money, enough to live only in slums. Because of the privatization, many social benefits that the population used to have such as free health care, free education and housing became inaccessible to billions of individuals.
According to UNICEF, they estimate that between 80 and 100 million Chinese live below the poverty line, taking as reference the international standard of one dollar a day. The number of death in China is quite high and UNICEF has been working towards diminish maternal and child mortality. This could be because of the development level of a country and also by socio-economic, cultural and political factors. If Urbanism and the right to adequate housing are considered Human Rights, then, places like Africa, and China are way far from offering all of their citizens basic Human Rights. As discussed in class, poverty is a violation of Human Rights. People die every day from diseases that could be treated but, because of the lack of money, lack of Governmental support and bad living conditions many people end up dying every day.
Works Cited
Sen, Amartya. “Development as Freedom.” Oxford University Press. New York. 1999.
Pogge, Thomas. “World Poverty and Human Rights.” Polite Press, Massachusetts, 2008.
Unicef. “Unite for Children.” Accessed on March 22, 2010 From:
http://www.unicef.org/index.php
© 2010, ATassini. All rights reserved.
Nearly all the communities in India, such as Bengali, are succumbed in ‘Culture of Poverty’ (a theory once introduced by an US anthropologist Oscar Lewis), irrespective of class or economic strata, lives in pavement or apartment, nobody is really at all ashamed of the deep-rooted corruption, decaying general quality of life, worst Politico-administration, immature mother language, continuous absorption of common space(mental & physical, both), is becoming parents by blindfold self procreation simply depriving their(the incoming children) fundamental rights of a decent, caring society. Do not ever look for other positive alternative behaviour(values), i.e. deliberately co-parenting of those children who are born out of ignorance, real poverty. All of us is being driven and followed by the very animal instinct. Can the Indian(Bengali) people ever be able to bring that genuine freedom (from vicious cycle of ‘poverty’) in their own life/attitude, start themselves ‘Production of (social)Space’, at least initiate a movement, by heart.