By IPS Correspondents
BRIDGETOWN, Sep 9 1997 (IPS)

Eighty-three year old Harcourt Carter is living in a shack that offer him little shelter from he sun, wind and rain. For the last four months with the help of his parliamentary representative he has been trying to find a place to live, but without any success.

The shack whichis now falling down around him, Carter has called home for the last 42 years.

Thirty-one year old Pauline Brown (not her real name) is in a similar situation. The cardboard house in which she lives with her four children ranging in age from five to 13, is beginning to fall apart around her. Unemployed and with no-one to turn to the future looks bleak, she says.

But Brown and Carter are only two of thousands of Barbadians in this island with a total population of 252,000 who are living in abject poverty.

But for these people who are almost at the point of giving up, help may be on its way, says the Barbadian government. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) recently launched a Poverty Alleviation Programme here aimed at assisting people who find themselves in situations similar to those of Carter and Brown.

“A society that ostracises its people by not extending to them the necessary support systems will so alienate those people that social conflict, crime and revolt will be engendered and the very social fabric destroyed,” said Prime Minister, Owen Athur as he launched the project last month.

UNDP officials say they plan to conduct detailed studies of the problem to ensure that the neediest Barbadians are the ones who will actually benefit under the project.

“We are proposing to cluster the 11 parishes into four where we would invite representatives of various groups. They should hopefully give us an insight into what are the challenges the poor are facing,” explains UNDP area representative Marjorie Thorpe.

“Our role here is to ensure we know what the options are in eradicating poverty,” adds UNDP special advisor, Darwin Clarke.

Some 217 households mainly in the rural areas will benefit under the programme.

In a recently published document on poverty the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) listed the rural parish of St. John as one of the poorest in the eastern Caribbean island.

But Opposition Democratic Labour Party leader and constituency representative for St. John, David Thompson is arguing that government has played a role in the impoverishment of the area, saying that of the jobs created by the ruling Barbados Labour Party (BLP) within at least six departments, less than two percent were given to the people of St. John.

Thompson is therefore calling for a sizeable portion of the five million dollars being put into this project to be allocated to this area of the country.

“It (the money) should go towards relieving poverty of health care, poverty of housing, poverty of infrastructure and poverty of adequate transprt,” he says.

Under the project assistance will be given to poor Barbadians in repairing houses which are at present in a state of disrepair and assist others who are now living on the streets to have a place to call home.

Meanwhile, according to a Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) official who requested anonymity, the amount of money being allocated is not enough to “remove all the poverty in Barbados.”

He also wants government to ensure that measures aimed at alleviating poverty are not just temporary but will go towards the root cause of the problem.

“Of course, it is important that there is some sort of short- term relief while dealing with the long-term problem, but if all the programmes are only geared for short-term relief and do not deal with the root causes, then you are spinning tot-in-mud and treating the poor as political pawns,” he says.

One lecturer at the University of the West Indies who asked not to be named agrees. He says government needs to understand the extent of suffering in the country and come up with the right measures to deal with each group.

“The poor is not a homogeneous group. There are people who are poor because they are physically and mentally challenged, ill or too sick to work. Some households are poor because of the lack of education and opportunities for its members.

“The way of dealing with the situation is by putting in place a framework for continuously monitoring the poverty status of the population, and monitoring the impact of various strategies on their target group,” he says.

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