Jul

11

Developing The World

Filed Under World 

Mwamanongu Village water source, Tanzania. Image via Wikipedia

Phrases like “developing countries” are often used to describe poor nations. The truth of course is that all countries are still developing, perhaps the rate of change is slower in some countries. Development in this context means growth or progress, both of these terms imply that things are getting bigger or better.

It’s not a trivial matter to define what “better” means for the human race. David Gordon does a pretty good job of it in his paper “Indicators of Poverty and Hunger” which identifies 8 things that are important for peoples standard of living.

  1. Food
  2. Safe drinking water
  3. Sanitation facilities
  4. Health
  5. Shelter
  6. Education
  7. Information
  8. Access to services

The first five of these items are not just important, they are required for people to survive. Some additional things commonly thought to improve quality of life are

9. Freedom

10. Love/Relationships

In future posts I will be covering each of items in the list shown above … why they’re important, how the world is doing now and what can be done to improve in the future. Subscribe to the RSS Feed to get notified of new posts.

If you have any ideas about other things that can improve our quality of life please leave a comment below.

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Comments

4 Responses to “Developing The World”

  1. Jarrod - Warrior Development on July 15th, 2008 3:53 pm

    Hi Thomas,

    I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the presented topics. I find it hard to figure out how to improve things on the large scale so I’ll be interested.

    Standard of living/Quality of life is supposed to be an attempt at an objective measure of happiness right? It has been a while since I have used the term.

  2. Ashwin on July 15th, 2008 4:15 pm

    Hello,

    “Developing” in poorer nations and helping this countries out is a great idea. However I believe it is much much harder then helping say disaster victims in the U.S.

    1) Possibly due to the fact the whole political system there is corrupt.

    2) at least half your donations (if not more) won’t even reach the people needing this.

    So what would be the best way to help a community out?

  3. admin on July 15th, 2008 4:31 pm

    Ashwin,

    Interesting thoughts.

    1) Corruption is definitely one of the issues I’ll be looking into in future articles.

    2) A lot of people are put off donating by the possibility that the donations won’t reach those in need. It’s important to research the charities to find out how they spend the donations they receive, http://www.charitynavigator.org/ is a good place to start your research.

    Currently I think the best way to help poor communities is to support education of the people. This can be done through many charities such as http://roomtoread.org/ - you can give a donation which they will use to build schools and libraries or sponsor the education of an individual.

  4. admin on July 15th, 2008 4:49 pm

    Jarrod,

    I definitely should have been more clear about my use of the terms standard of living and quality of life. The definitions are quite fuzzy and often people mean different things when they use them, but I can at least tell you what they mean to me.

    The term “Standard of living” refers to the more objective measures.

    “Quality of Life” refers to the level of wellbeing or hapiness. This is definitely influenced by standard of living but also takes into account other more intangible factors such as relationships, freedom and individual psychology.

    Hopefully that makes things a bit clearer.

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