An Inclusive World
By Sundeep Waslekar

Once I read an interesting story. Someone met a little boy about 4 or 5 years old. He gave him a world map from a magazine, tore it into pieces and challenged him to put it together again. The boy did it in a few minutes. How did the little one know the location of Uruguay and Vietnam, Kenya and Kazakhstan? He said: "Behind the picture of the map there was a picture of a man. I put together the man and the world was together again." This is indeed the challenge before us: to reaffirm the human spirit so that we can bring the world together again. The challenge is to create an inclusive world where you, me and everyone has a stake.

We live in a world of opportunity. We can walk in outer space. We can look into the inner core of an atom. For those of us who are included, the world is great.

Since we exclude large segments of population from our world of opportunity, we have also created a world at risk. There is fear in the East. There is terror in the West. There is riot in the North. There is Darfur in the South. And for 10 million children who die every year with empty mouths, the world is shame. It is a shame.

To perpetuate inclusion and justify exclusion, we play games. Until the last century the name of the game was war, genocide and fascism. Now it is terrorism and counter-terrorism. Some relate it to religion. Some say it has to do with foreign occupation. Some say the purpose is revolution. The fact of the matter is that it is about relative deprivation. For an unemployed young man in Colombia or Nepal it is not enough to know that there are more unfortunate people in Peru or Cambodia. If he feels that he is deprived as compared to others in his own capitals or earns less than what his parents used to earn, he enters the RED (relative economic deprivation) zone and prepares to take up arms.

We need weapons no longer, not even smart weapons. Mere callousness is enough. About 500 million children will be put to death in the next 50 years, without the food that is rotting in the granaries of many countries and suffering from diseases that can be treated. This is more than the number of killings in all the wars of the last 2000 years. Do we really want a world where callousness means confidence? Do we really want a world where exclusion means success? Do we really want a world where war means peace?

The evidence of our collective callousness is abundantly present in the first continent. I call Africa the first continent because it's there that the humanity began. About 25000 years ago, there was a community near today's Lake Edward. They knew fishing, cooking and counting. They made the first table of primary numbers. It was carved onto what is known as the Ishango bone. We can now see it in a museum in Brussels. About 2500 years ago, Africa introduced the blast furnace, which made today's industrialisation possible. Somewhere along the line, Africa also invented the binary system, leading to the foundation of computer science.

Now about a dozen countries in the first continent are striving hard to speed up their economic growth. Unfortunately, all this growth is in pockets and highly inequitable. Therefore, in Africa as a whole, people earning below a dollar a day are likely to increase from 350 million now to over 400 million by 2015. It will take Africa another one hundred years to meet the Millennium Development Goals with this malaise.

Of course, Africa is not alone. South Asia, Central Asia and parts of Latin America also account for the global pool of the poor. On the other hand, the swelling number of economic successes from India, China, Thailand, Korea, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Brazil and many other countries prove one thing. It is possible to overcome poverty and despair. Hope has future.

What do we do now to instill concern in our heart in the place of callousness? What do we do now to generate prosperity where there is poverty? What do we do now to construct peace and deconstruct terror? It is easy to criticise. It is easy to be cynical. It is much more important to find a way forward.

When the Second World War ravaged a part of the world, we had the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe. When colonialism ended, we had development to build infrastructure and address basic human needs of the post-colonial societies. We now need transformation to include the excluded in our world of opportunity. Development was about help. Transformation is about empowerment. Development was about survival. Transformation is about actualisation. Development was about the context of despair. Transformation is about the context of hope. Development was needed to provide life. Transformation is essential to provide meaning to life.

The framework of transformation can be as follows:
- Not just literacy, but capacity building
- Not just poverty alleviation, but productive employment
- Not just high income, but high esteem
- Not just governance, but participation
- Not just investments, but partnership

With transformation, we can build an inclusive world, like a home in which every habitant has a stake. The foundation of this house must be sustainable childhood. Others have emphasised the role of malnutrition and primary school to achieve this goal. Others have emphasised the role of malnutrition and primary school to achieve this goal. I would like to focus on secondary school education, simply because it is understated.

If education can provide the foundation, productive employment will build the walls of our house of hope. There are currently 100 million unemployed young people in the age group of 15-25. About 100 million young people will join labour force every year in the next decade. At the current rate, at least 10 million of them will be drawn into the pool of the unemployed, making another 100 million or a total of 200 million by 2015.

We need new instruments to be able to create new industries and new employment on a large scale. We need to promote entrepreneurship and self-employment. For instance, the private sector can promote venture capital funds especially designed for micro enterprises. There is already experience of 3000 micro-finance companies that can be used. As these funds are likely to carry higher risk, multilateral development banks and governments can subsidise the promoters in public-private partnership.

Along similar lines, there is scope for social capital for capacity-building, employment generation and entrepreneurship development. In one of the poorest parts of Western India, fishermen build community trusts where they contribute a share of their income to a common pool. It is then used for financing health and education of the needy and also to provide seed capital for young fishermen to purchase new boats and nets. The common pool thus enables one person after another to be free from debt and get into business.

The most urgent need is for a group of leaders to come together informally and form a moral compass. These must be leaders of certain standing, leading important governments or constituencies, so that others will listen to them. They can then explore solutions to the most serious problems of poverty, occupation, terrorism. The informal processes can slowly pave the way for a formal one involving the main players.

This idea of global transformation to create an inclusive world may look like one Utopia. It may look like a dream too unrealistic. But is it more realistic to believe that the world will survive the next 50 years on the bodies of 500 million children? Is it more realistic to expect that the world will survive the anguish of millions of unemployed youth?

We need an inclusive world not merely because of the fear of our survival. We need it because hope is feasible. We need it because dreaming is good and aspirations are essential. We need it because every citizen of the earth can become a participant. We need it because the tomorrow is ours. We need it because the impossible is often possible.

All we need to do is to construct our common global home where you, me and everyone has a stake. All we need to do is to reaffirm the human spirit. We can then bring the world together again.