Blog Action Day: What is Public Health? What is Poverty?

In honor of today’s Blog Action Day on poverty, here is a background on poverty and how social marketing can be applied, as I saw broken down by Philip Kotler himself at the World Social Marketing Conference.

Additionally, join over 40 of DC’s influential changemakers at Buffalo Billiards at DC’s 1st Changeblogger meetup. We will recognize and commemorate Blog Action Day, connect with Alex Steed’s social change tour, mingle and share re: living and working for positive change.

What is poverty?

In researching the answer to this question, I couldn’t escape the purpose behind a campaign by the Association of Public Health Schools and the Pfizer Foundation recently created called “What is public health?” This campaign works to better brand ‘public health’ to the public, while also raising awareness, education and encouraging participation in the public health conversation. Participants are asked to put red “This is public health stickers” on items that they feel represent public health. My challenge: What would this look like if the question: “What is poverty?” was asked?

Early Solutions to Poverty

Kotler listed 4 early solutions to poverty: alms programs, workhouses for the poor, deficit financing and economic development. With these solutions, four major strategies reveal themselves to reduce poverty:

Economic Growth Strategy
Redistribution Strategy
Massive Foreign Aid
Population Control

As Kotler continued to outline, he stated the “Two Main Thrusts” used to alleviate poverty are population control (from contraceptive campaigns, to abortions, education of women, industrialization to passing laws restricting the number of children) and improving the support of povert-escaping behavior. This umbrellas micro finance and empowerment, education and health programs.

The Goal

As part of the Millennium Goals, the World Bank and the United Nations have 8 goals and 17 targets to alleviate poverty (Kotler). One goal is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by:

Cutting in half the proportion of people whose income is less than a $1 a day.
Halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

Why Care?

Everyone hears we need to solve poverty, but my eyes were widened as to WHY we need to solve hunger. And, this goes beyond the humanity of reasons, but puts some more solid evidence to the issue. Kotler spoke of these 6 reasons:

Sympathy and compassion about wasted lives.
Poverty drives some poor people into crime and terrorism.
Poor are more prone to health problems and spreading of disease.
Poor are more likely to follow demogogues.
Poor nations can collapse into “failed states” that cannot pay their foreign debt.
The poor are an untapped trillion dollar market opportunity.

Why Social Marketing?

Kotler, along with social marketing expert Nancy Lee, both are literally writing the book answering this part of the poverty question. I personally can’t wait for the book to come out because I truly believe that social marketing provides the right tools for us to solve global issues such as poverty. In the presentation, Kotler identified a 6-part framework as to how social marketing can be applied to the poverty issue. However, in the book, a larger and more developed framework is offered, as well as further context of the issue.

So, back to the challenge. How would you answer this question: What is poverty?

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7 thoughts on “Blog Action Day: What is Public Health? What is Poverty?”

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julian October 17, 2008 at 5:09 am

I can’t wait for their book to come out. I’m really intrigued to what they have to say on the matter.

Soul Economy October 17, 2008 at 10:56 am

The definition provided by The World Bank captures what I believe poverty is:

“Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time. Poverty is losing a child to illness brought about by unclean water. Poverty is powerlessness, lack of representation and freedom.”

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Dan Bassill October 27, 2008 at 8:52 pm

I use maps to show where poverty and poor schools are concentrated in Chicago, as part of an effort to help volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs grow in all of these areas. I think maps could be used to build a distribution of resources to places all over the world.

However, the maps are just part of the solution. We need thousand of people who use their communications ability to draw attention to these maps on a daily basis, the way advertisers and evangelists draw daily attention to their stores.

I write more about this and apply this thinking on my blog. I hope you’ll take a look.

roulette strategy man November 3, 2008 at 3:39 am

To deal with global warming, the government needs to immediately plant more trees, and stop cutting them down. This alone helps with food supply. It is a major problem they need to deal with. The importance of trees has been understated by “scientists” that truly don’t understand the relevance of trees. Don’t criticize the importance of the concept until you know all the facts. On top of deforestation, we are polluting the environment. Another contributing factor is modern day energy systems rely on explosion rather than implosion, and this generates heat. Every systems need to be more efficient and work on implosion, so they stay cool. The non-profit energy research organization at http://www.universalsymbiosis.org is active in these areas which will help reverse effects of global warming. I suggest everyone also read “Living Energies” by Callum Coats which explains the work of Victor Schauberger and the importance of trees to our planet. Don’t rely on information from the authorities as their advisors don’t fully understand the life cycle of the planet. We need to push the authorities to develop forest management and sustainability plans, and this will solve at least part of the problem.

Carrie Tucker November 9, 2008 at 9:18 pm

I think that where we put our focus if very powerful. Mother Theresa wouldn’t be a part of anything anti war, but she was ready to participate in anything promoting PEACE. That is why I chose to talk about the abundance that is already available to provide solutions today.

Many blessings.

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7 thoughts on “Blog Action Day: What is Public Health? What is Poverty?”