From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

2 POWER AND POLITICS I HAVE RIGHTS, THEREFORE I AMRIGHTS AND POVERTYOxfam starts from the premise that poverty is a state of relativepowerlessness in which people are denied the ability to control crucialaspects of their lives. 12 Poverty is a symptom of deeply rooted inequitiesand unequal power relationships, institutionalised through policiesand practices at the levels of state, society, and household. People oftenlack money, land, or freedom because they are discriminated againston the grounds of one or more aspects of their personal identity –their class, gender, ethnicity, age, or sexuality – constraining their abilityto claim and control the resources that allow them choices in life.One in seven people in the world – about 900 million people –experiences discrimination on the basis of ethnic, linguistic, orreligious identities alone. 13 These excluded groups form the hard coreof the ‘chronic poor’. Some unequal power relationships are due toage-old injustices. In the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in northernIndia, for instance, close to 80 per cent of women require theirhusband’s permission to visit a health centre, and 60 per cent have toseek permission before stepping outside their house. Other suchrelationships are the more recent result of economic globalisation andimbalances in negotiating power between rich and poor countries.The underlying purpose of a rights-based approach to developmentis to identify ways of transforming the self-perpetuating viciouscircle of poverty, disempowerment, and conflict into a virtuous circlein which all people, as rights-holders, can demand accountabilityfrom states as duty-bearers, and where duty-bearers have both thewillingness and capacity to fulfil, protect, and promote people’shuman rights.A rights-based approach rejects the notion that people living inpoverty can only meet their basic needs as passive recipients of charity.People are the active subjects of their own development, as they seekto realise their rights. Development actors, including the state, shouldseek to build people’s capabilities to do so, by guaranteeing their rightsto the essentials of a decent life: education, health care, water andsanitation, and protection against violence, repression, or suddendisaster. Less gritty issues such as access to information and technologyare no less important in the long run.27