For most of history, convention has held that the poor will always be with us. However, in the 21st century, there has been a concerted global effort to rebut this convention, beginning with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals that transitioned to the Sustainable Development Goals.

There’s reason to be optimistic. China and India have achieved the greatest recorded accomplishment in poverty reduction by lifting almost 600 million and 300 million people respectively out of absolute poverty since 2000.

Globally, absolute poverty has declined and continues to do so in all the continents, except in Africa.

The paradox in Africa is while relative poverty reduction tracks with global trends, because of rapidly growing populations, the absolute numbers continue to rise.

An estimated 410 million people still live in absolute poverty today, about a third of the total population of the continent. After spending hundreds of billions of dollars on various development assistance, national government expenditure, and non-governmental programmes and projects in agricultural and rural development, education, health, infrastructure and institutional development, abject poverty persists on the continent.

The deepest cut poverty creates in any individual is the loss of dignity, autonomy, agency and choice, that depending on the charity engenders.

Too many poverty reduction activities go about making choices for the poor to access resources or opportunities, compel them into conditionalities to access assistance, and persist in “knowing better” than the poorest what is good for them. While seeking to do and often achieving good, by taking away the agency and autonomy, they fail to acknowledge the poorest among us have inherent agency and choice, and a desire for dignified lives.

What could give the poorest such dignity, agency and choice? Jobs, farm and business incomes, and certain forms of social security support come to mind. Employment creation is the surest way to do so, but African economies are failing in creation of wage jobs through industrial growth, thriving service businesses, and commercial agriculture, while public social support payments are too small. The current default in most countries is relying on the informal sector that is mostly unable to provide levels of employment and incomes sufficient for escape from absolute poverty by the majority of the People.

What then should be done to give the poorest a realistic chance at escaping from their circumstances? The basic services such as provision of education and health services, roads, water, market facilities, communications, electricity and water, social support payments as well as extension and inputs for agricultural and livestock production are necessary but not sufficient to provide the required poverty escape velocity.

What if the accelerant that will enable the poverty escape is overlaying basic services with sufficiently large sums of unconditional cash transfers in the hands of the poorest? The cash transfers would enable the poorest to exercise autonomy, choice and agency in spending the money in the respective settings. Evidence gathered from robust studies indicates that such payments have provided recipients with tangible and intangible benefits.

Intangible benefits include a renewed sense of personal dignity and agency the cash brings, purpose and accomplishment when the projects funded by these funds are initiated and completed.

The tangibles include homes repaired or rebuilt, livestock bought, inputs bought and land leased for agricultural production, food stocked for the season, school fees paid, health issues attended to, enterprises started, and greater financial inclusion for individuals and communities.

Trusting the poorest to make right choices with large unconditional transfers is likely to make for sound public policy. In fact, the poorest countries should consider making such transfers an integral part of government, donor and NGO expenditure, so the investments in public services provision and infrastructure are overlaid by targeted large unconditional cash transfers to the poorest individuals and households.

Traditional national and international development spending is taken up by administrative costs that can take up to half of the dollars spent, and often does not directly benefit individual poor recipients. By contrast, dollars transferred directly via mobile money to individually identified and verified recipients cut these costs by half and get into the right hands.

Unconditional cash transfers ($550 per adult or $1,000 per household) by GiveDirectly have been shown to be practical and cost-efficient in overlaying traditional programmes and projects for poverty reduction. With only five years to 2030, it makes sense for national governments, development and non-governmental agencies to give this accelerant for poverty escape consideration as they gather to review progress on the SDGs at the UN General Assembly in New York next month.

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