Coming from a country where poverty is nothing you have to search for, I have read very interesting proposals on how poverty can be brought to an end - for once and for all. 2015 for my country, Kenya. My country is certainly very rich of such proposals in it is national archives, government departments, ministries and and countless civil societies offices. I had wished they sold for money.

Having been brought up in a humbling evironment, that has always known poverty as it is by-word, I have come to believe that it will take eternity to eradicate it, it at all. I have read very beautiful strategies about how this can be eradicated, but good only on paper. I remember a few years ago in campus, there was a whole course dedicated to national development, whose objective was to economically empower the people, and is infamously known as Session Paper no. 10 in Kenya. Economists in my country use this as a study case of how paper work isn't necessarily a solution. I remember my professor used to refer to it as a strategy NOT worthy the paper it is written on and 'paper dream'.

My observations in the international scene about similar efforts to eradicate poverty aren't any better. If anything, they are grossly off target. While reviewing my brother's Ph.D paper on what bedevil's Kenya's economic progress, it occurred to me that multi-lateral lending agencies such as world bank and IMF are as equally to blame as bad governance is. Well, that is for another blog, another day.

It is no hidden secret that sections of Kenya are simply starving. Since September my google alert on Kenya hardly misses a line about starvation in Kenya. By extension, this are the results of glaring and abject poverty particularly in the North Eastern parts of the country. It is paradoxical though to read in the same alert about how food is being wasted in Kitale (Kenya's grain basket) if not being sold to Tanzanians who will ultimately sell it to Malawi and Mozambique. May be I am yet to come to terms with globalization, but sounds rather odd.

As the situation aggravated, I admired my country's effort to request for international food aid. I remember receiving an weekly alert from alertnet.org a few days ago and Kenya's case of femine was one of such cases in the horn of Africa. This stories will tell better than I can do with my keybord: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/photoalbum/1135265424.htm. The linked stories tell of hunger, pain, suffering, want and, you guessed it right, the results of abject poverty.

It is painful and suprising though that in a country with such poverty that such opulence, style, extravagance and luxury as captured by the The Standard - http://eastandard.net/hm_news/news.php?articleid=35261 - will be in the same country. The introduction to the headline read in part:
"Flagrant consumption, open display of extravagance and public wastage was at its very grotesque on Thursday even as pangs of hunger cut through parts of the country."

Talk of 2 worlds in the same country! A reader with no knowledge of East Africa will think that the 2 cases above refer to different countries, and indeed economies.

I have lived at Stanford - in the neighborhood of America's richest economy - for four months now and I cannot remember a day in my life here that I have seen a large concentration of as many luxury cars as I have seen in Kenya on many occassions without number. Infact, I have not been privileged to see some of the luxurious limos that my president rides in. While doing his computation, the author of the linked article, Francis Openda, has estimated in a day, the government spends KES 1M in a day on such luxury alone. This translates to $4.5m in a year. What is more suprising is, this is a conserative estimate.

In a nutshell, it turns out that such luxury as decribed in the article is the way to do business and indeeed to 'end' poverty, at least in my coutry. I stand to be corrected, but poverty eradication to me seems like a 'paper dream'.