A Higher Quality of Life Is The Solution That Income Inequality Is Looking For

Those who say money can’t buy happiness may not realize how right they are. While happiness in general peaks once basic physiological and safety needs are met, merely having more money doesn’t ensure one has the ability to fulfill those needs, especially in developing countries. What good is money if there is no access to clean water, fresh food, or basic medicine? What if local political powers forcefully take it from you, or are unwilling to protect you from those who do? At illuminAid, we seek to help not only the monetarily poor, but those who are multidimensionally poor. 

Multidimensional poverty includes a host of additional factors beyond income including, but not limited to, access to clean water, healthy foods, and medical services; political stability; individual rights and freedoms; and opportunities for education and employment. It’s no coincidence that these elements closely align with those basic physiological and safety needs represented at the base of Maslow’s Hierarchy. Unfortunately, more people in Africa have access to cell phone service than to electricity, piped clean water, or sanitary sewer systems. Often, poverty metrics only include GDP per capita of a particular nation, but that can be misleading as to the impact of poverty. 

Perhaps not surprising, Haiti, South Sudan, and Liberia have some of the highest rates of dissatisfaction with their standard of living. Nations with similar GDP per capita but higher quality of life satisfaction, such as Bangladesh and Cambodia, may be to a certain degree explained by lower impacts from multidimensional poverty metrics.

Some lessons can be gleaned from the Central American nation of Costa Rica, a country with a low GDP per capita similar to Botswana, but with higher life satisfaction than the United States, despite “particularly high” income inequality. Every year since 2012, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a global initiative for the UN, publishes an annual World Happiness Report, of which Costa Rica is consistently at or near the top. Even with low GDP per capita, citizens have access to quality education and enjoy high literacy rates, clean water supplies in rural areas, and universal access to preventive health care. Much of this may be possible, at least in part, due to the fact that they are one of the few countries without a military.

However, before changes can be made at the governmental and societal levels, they must be made at the individual level. illuminAid endeavors to provide tools to communities so that they have the ability to overcome their unique circumstances. illuminAid has already made impacts in the aforementioned countries of Haiti, South Sudan, and Liberia, to name a few. Despite these strides, there’s more to do. As Ben Franklin so eloquently stated many years ago, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”