What can Africa learn from China’s experience of poverty alleviation?
China’s efforts to help the poor segments of its rural population are commendable given the challenges the most populous country would face, and it is moving further to implementing its rural revitalization strategy which was devised during the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2017.
Despite the relativity of poverty which makes it difficult not only to define but also to fight, to-date China has managed to successfully fight absolute poverty by ensuring its people’s access to all the basic needs that any country would owe its citizens, thanks to the CPC for its unwavering commitment to serve the people.
While addressing the nation in February this year, President Xi Jinping of China announced that the political will and optimum utilization of resources made it possible for China to lift up its remaining 98.99 million people who were still languishing in poverty, by among other measures, identifying the locations where they live, their needs, and finding suitable areas for them to relocate.
It was under such initiatives starting in the year 2012 that some Chinese communities had to relocate from their traditional mountainous areas, including some parts of Tibet that were impassable, to areas with better transport and communication infrastructure for them to have access to crucial services and where the government could serve them better.
This can somehow resemble Tanzania’s villagization under the brand of Ujamaa Villages in the 1970s, which a few other African countries implemented at the time, whose intention was to serve the people better as it was then. However, it differs given the time and the level of development that has attained so far with advanced industrialization as well as farming and educational systems that did not exist before the Cultural Revolution which ended in 1978.
The relocation programs are designed in such a way that they would support the activities that were previously difficult for the target communities to maximize productivity by, for instance, ensuring markets for their agricultural or livestock products as well as providing expert services in sustaining the said activities for the people to continue producing, supplying, and thus sustaining their lives and contributing to the general welfare of their nation.
Moreover, although the targeted poverty eradication efforts were promoted by China’s central government, its implementation was localized and remained people-centred since it was the people mobilized and coordinated at the village level in close cooperation with party officials. China’s approach to eradicating poverty aligns with the development theories in the modern era whereby the participation of beneficiary communities is emphasized for sustainability of the intended intervention.
Such efforts are augmented by the Chinese government’s continued implementation of the policy of opening up by attracting more investment both from within and outside the country in an effort to create more jobs for the people.
As a result, over 90 percent of China’s registered impoverished population has received some form of employment assistance, an effort that the Director General of the International Labor Organization, Guy Rider, commends and promotes as essential in lifting people out of poverty.
With some African countries, including Tanzania and Nigeria, already experiencing increasing levels of unemployment amid fast increase in youth population, China’s experience serves as a lesson that needs to be embraced in line with local conditions. A combination of political will, commitment to serve the people, as well as effective planning and implementation of microeconomic policies will push the countries to achieve their intended goals.
From the era of agrarian revolution in England to the recent Chinese experience, global history suggests a strong emphasis on agricultural modernization through industrialization, which would later guarantee a consistent supply of raw materials for manufacturing to pick up.
With the strengthening of infrastructure to facilitate transportation of people, farm implements and agricultural produce, this is a path that most African countries whose economies remain agrarian to-date could follow as one of the ways to ensure agricultural modernization and rural vitalization at large.
The approach will also help reduce rural-to-urban migration which currently characterizes majority of African countries given the abject conditions that force rural dwellers to flee to urban centers in anticipation of better social services and employment opportunities.
China’s recent success is a culmination of over forty years of hard work, determination and commitment to serve the people whereby before 2013, the country had lifted over 6.7 million people out of absolute poverty, and the 99 million people that remained formed the last batch, a job that just got finished.
