World poverty

When a drought hits a country like Bihar, or when floods savage the state of East Pakistan, the story is flashed across our television screens and makes newspaper headlines within hours. When the immediate interest is over, however, the victims of such disasters are all too easily forgotten. Their suffering remains but the rest of the world turns its attention elsewhere.
To some extent this is understandable because we know that relief teams and international organisations are at work. What we so often fail to realise is that the existing poverty which these disasters have reinforced require just as much sympathy and help. For this reason, in this book, Paul Henderson concentrates on long-term anti-poverty measures, showing the ways in which poor countries can help themselves to develop and the various ways in which aid and assistance is given, wherever it is needed, by international agencies like UNICEF and UNESCO, and by voluntary organisations like Oxfam and Save the Children Fund.
Mr Henderson outlines the elements of poverty in developing countries and shows that, without proper education, they will have little chance of overcoming the inter-related problems of disease, population growth, unemployment and hunger. These factors form as vicious a circle as the economic situation of the developing countries. But he also points out that in industrialised countries there are large areas of 'hidden' poverty-in. ethnic groups and old people for example which still have to be eliminated. Finally Mr Henderson looks at two champions of the poor-Mahatma Gandhi and Danilo Dolci-and shows how their lives helped to illuminate the nature of the fight against poverty and to others in the same cause. Paul Henderson is at present working for the Co-ordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service, a non-governmental organization attached