Dita De Boni: Capital can build people too

Illustration / Anna Crichton

In NZ or in Africa, human progress is as important as economic gains.

We live in a world where inequity is becoming more obvious by the day.

We see it here in New Zealand. A tale of two cities in Christchurch, for example, in which developers, builders and associated small businesses are benefiting from the rebuild, while a large group of people without much in the way of resources are becoming increasingly impoverished.

Same issue with the nation as a whole: we read stories of children without food in their stomachs and shoes on their feet and find it almost impossible to believe, because in our daily lives we only see light-hearted, well-fed kids. We may not regularly encounter the unemployed, or the retiree who cannot afford the heating overnight because his super only pays for four or five comfortable sleeps.

For anyone following the foreign news, the world's imbalances have never been so stark. Recently I watched a story from Liberia's capital, Monrovia, where people living in a slum had broken into an Ebola "isolation unit" (so-called, as it looked nothing like a proper isolation unit) and stolen food, blood-stained mattresses and bedding, and anything else they could lay their hands on.

It pointed up why Ebola is proving so hard to contain, but also something else: Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, the countries at the epicentre of the Ebola outbreak, do not have health systems capable of handling an epidemic like the one ravaging them now. Non-governmental organisations like Red Cross basically keep the skeletal system afloat.

Yet it is wrong to categorise Liberia, for one, as a country devoid of any growth prospects or resources. Its rate of "growth", averaged over 10 years, is 7 per cent - substantially higher than New Zealand has achieved.

A piece on the Huffington Post by international development consultant Dariusz Dziewanski explains that in fact, Liberia's reserves of iron ore, timber, gold, and diamonds are attracting lots of investment from foreign powers. But that investment hasn't trickled down. Dziewanski says 85 per cent of Liberians are without jobs in the formal sense, and almost 64 per cent of citizens live on less than a dollar a day.

How does this relate to New Zealand? Well, for one thing, we have the same official aid policy as do most developed nations: "trade, not aid". Our own aid agency's mission is "to support sustainable development in developing countries in order to reduce poverty and contribute to a more secure, equitable and prosperous world."

Which is a useful goal, except that - especially in the short term - it fails to account for what Dziewanski calls "human return over economic return". That means money used to ensure pregnancies are healthy, children are nourished and educated, and people have a life expectancy long enough to fulfil the economic vision the foreign investors (and they themselves, no doubt) would like to realise.

As investors in our own country, through our tax dollars, and as our own society becomes increasingly polarised into haves and have-nots, should the principle of human return be accorded equal status with economic return, if we are to have a prosperous future?

Or will we, like so many troubled countries, one day have to rely on the likes of the Red Cross and Save The Children to "plug the gaps" - and fulfil the role our government once considered its own?