Poverty is still a major global challenge, even though it’s one of the Millennium Development Goals. According to United Nations, anybody who lives below a dollar a day is considered to be poor. Poverty is closely related to lack of education, ignorance and occurrences of diseases. Majority of the people who stays in slums lives below a dollar a day (Thompson, 2015), and research shows that these people are either not educated at all or they are under educated or rather ignorance about education. Lack of education will automatically contribute to poverty and occurrence of cases of diseases. Majority of poor people are concentrated in slummy areas, as a project manager of reducing poverty in slummy areas, I felt something needed to be done to solve this night mare. Of course we can’t eradicate poverty in slums but we can reduce the levels of poverty by sensitizing and empowering this community about education and looking for donor funds to improve the living standards of people in slums (Hoyness, 2015).
The Goals of this Project are to;
- Reducing the poverty levels by at least 40%, whereas every household will have access to clean water and proper sewerage systems.
- Educate the community on the importance of education and make them realize that education is the only weapon to fight poverty.
- Finally, the project will focus on improving the living standards of households by constructing a beat of modern houses.
The objectives of the project will mainly focus on; improving the hygiene levels by devising a waste collection method, creating employment and eradication of diseases that occurs as a result of unhygienic conditions.
The key customers to this project will be the slum community or population, as the project manager, this proposal puts me to task and my colleagues to ensure that we deliver the appropriate services to the slum community to ensure the poverty levels are reduced. After achieving all the goals and objectives, then we will conclude that poverty levels have been successfully reduced (Duffy, 2013). The key stakeholder of this project is a group of individuals or rather a non-governmental organization, who were touched by the poor living conditions in our slums. They came together and vowed to find a solution to this matter, they can’t solve all the problems in the slums or help all the slums however, and little help they will provide financially will be able to solve a portion of the slum community. This project might be complex to deliver in a way, but hard work and patience from all the volunteers will really be appreciative as far as delivering this project is concerned.
The project will be done in terms of priorities and timeline, the first thing will be community education; educating them will impart them with the knowledge about poverty, what are the causes and a way to avoid poverty. Improving the levels of hygiene will follow, poor hygiene leads to diarrheal diseases and we can’t reduce poverty in an ailing community, so sanitation levels must be improved. Constructing modern houses for them might not be a permanent solution, but creating the employments might be. One can have a very nice house but lacks food and basic necessities in that house so employment creation is a key factor to reduce the poverty levels of community in the slums. The source of the projects funding will be from the NGO and a ministry within the government, it won’t be cheap to achieve the goals of this project; a good amount of money will be required. Slum communities consist of a large population and approximately $10 million will be required for the poverty levels to be reduced. This amount is a provisional amount; this amount is inclusive of the workers wage. Workers will be employed especially on waste collections and constructions which will be the most consumer of the largest part of this amount.
Such projects cannot run smoothly without minor challenges, poor people are a beat ignorance about things that happens around them (Patel, 2015). We anticipate encountering some challenges; the major challenge is financial, our budget exceeds the funds we get from both the government and the NGO. Secondly we anticipate experiencing some resistance from some households in the slums; of course not everybody is comfortable with change and new lifestyle. The third problem we expect to experience is lack of adequate resources and enough skilled man power to execute the project, we will require resources such as vehicles and trucks that we might to fully access. This project will also create employment to some youths, but the financial resources available will limit the number of employees that might not even be enough.
Recommendations;
- The government should provide budgetary allocation every financial year to curb the poverty levels in slums.
- Well-wishers should join hand and contribute financially to ensure the problems in slums are solved and the living standards are improved.
- Government should roll out an education program that favors children from poor backgrounds for them to fully access education.
- General population should consider the people in slums as people like us and stop associating them with vices.
References;
- Thompson, T. (2015). Poverty in America.
- Hoynes, H. W., Patel, A. J., & National Bureau of Economic Research,. (2015). Effective policy for reducing inequality?: The Earned Income Tax Credit and the distribution of income.
- Duffy, J., Christoph, J. N., Goldblatt, E., Graff, N., Nowacek, R. S., & Trabold, B. (2013).Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after “”Literacy in American Lives””. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
- Berry, R. (2000). The research project: How to write it. London: Routledge.