* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Statistics on inequality grab public attention because they are powerful and useful. But they only tell part of the story.
In Maranhão, Brazil, landless women organise to challenge the power of landlords who are illegally denying them access to the forests on which their livelihoods depend. Women in the Ugandan village of Kapchorwa come together not only to plan their farms and businesses but to plan how they will confront female genital mutilation (FGM), ensure that women are not restricted to the home, how they will hold the local authorities accountable for ensuring schools, health care centres, roads, and drinking water. In Tanzania, children’s clubs organise to fight child marriage. In Bangladesh, women garment workers demand safer conditions and decent pay. These are the heroes in the front line challenge to inequality. Their struggles will determine whether we end up with a world fit for us all.
A lot has been said recently about shocking statistics on inequality that show how wealth and power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a few. Those statistics grab public attention because they are powerful and useful. But they only tell part of the story. The most important, most troubling but also most hopeful story is the human story. That’s where we start. In ActionAid’s work with over five thousand communities across forty-five countries, we see the increasingly extreme inequality from the grassroots: how does it deepen poverty, and what are the solutions to tackle inequality from the bottom up? We also see from our work with local communities how inequality of power holds back justice and dignity and that any long term solution has to be based on changing power from below. And we see the vital connections between the different types of inequality - and the fundamental importance of taking a feminist approach to challenging it.
The inequality debate is littered with jargon such as "capture of the state" by elites. But the experiences behind these words are very real for poor and excluded people. When a community of landless people in my home country, Brazil, organises themselves to claim the right to land reform and access to land, next morning they usually find themselves opposed by the local judge, chief of police, mayor and others who are all deeply connected to the landlords. This means claiming their legal rights is much more tortuous and difficult than for those who are better off.
The same happens in countries across the world when the interests of one multinational company come together with the private or political interests of people in government, resulting in an explosion of land-grabs and evictions of poor farmers. ActionAid and many others have been challenging these by organising and mobilising from below. A small and isolated landless community is much more vulnerable to a land-grab, than a strong landless movement that can exert pressure and campaign for changes to land ownership laws and hold accountable those authorities that don’t fulfil their obligations. In our experience, solutions to poverty and inequality depend on organising with the powerless in campaigning to shift power to people. In ActionAid our work in organising landless people goes hand in hand with our #LandFor campaign where we connect communities with national and international policy making. Only a broad coalition can curb the power of companies to take land. At the same time we promote positive alternatives, encouraging reform programs that increase the access of the poor to land.
Another example of the "capture of the state" is how public credit for entrepreneurs tends to be concentrated in larger investments for industrial scale agriculture, excluding the smallholder famers, women entrepreneurs associations and cooperatives. Once again it can take years of campaigning to challenge the unfair credit policies and create exclusive credit lines for small entrepreneurs. In Uganda, for instance, a crucial part of ActionAid’s work has been mobilising smallholder women farmers so they can claim access to agricultural credit that otherwise would end in the bank accounts of large commercial farmers or companies. A number of innovative public policies have been created to counter the trend of public resources being captured by the rich, for example the Brazilian Family Farmers credit (PRONAF) and the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). These are illustrations that show that rising inequality can be countered when powerless people are aware and organised. There have been amazing victories and they point us to the path for change, but these efforts are not yet enough to realise change on the scale that poor and excluded people need. In fact, with inequalities of wealth and power heading in the wrong direction, it is time to ask ourselves serious questions.
So what else is missing in the fight against inequality? We should look beyond inequality of wealth to inequality of power, recognising that there are many other forces at work that create discrimination. Missing from the debate have been the power forces that underlie gender discrimination, such as the rising burden of women’s unpaid care work, the lack of women’s access to public services and the increasing tide of violence against women.
Again, to address this we need to connect local awareness-raising with campaigning at all levels - and this combination has proved effective in helping women to claim better public services and effective action by local authorities to reduce violence against women. Challenging inequality starts with bringing the powerless together, supporting their local action, organising women groups and supporting women’s movements - which is then reinforced by our Safe Cities for Women campaign.
Education is a crucial sector as it can be the most powerful equalising force in a society. We organise and mobilise parents, children, teachers and community leaders to develop school improvement plans and citizens’ reports on the state of education, leading to national campaigns for change in countries such as Nepal, Ghana, Mozambique and Malawi. But to secure more resources for long term investment in education requires coordinated action at national and international level to expand the tax base, for example challenging harmful tax incentives and aggressive tax avoidance by multinational companies. Our #taxpower campaign mobilises people to make the connections between fair taxation and progressive spending - both essential in helping reduce inequality.
Striking global statistics tell us a lot about inequality. A huge task ahead is to ground this debate at a local level - and crucially to explore the most effective actions that can be taken by governments and by society at national and international level that can seriously redress power imbalances. There is a wealth of solid experiences that are successful and repeatable. It is time now for us to ground the debate in practical experiences and move from the diagnosis of the problem to concrete people-led solutions.
Civil society is beginning to come together in addressing the problem and build the movement needed to fight the drivers of inequality, so that we can realise the rights of the poor and marginalised on a larger scale. Recently, ActionAid has convened a new group, united under the banner #fightinequality that brings together human rights, faith, environmentalists, feminist groups and trade unions in a common cause. It is rooted in strengthening the power of the people to challenge the people in power. At the local level, people are not at all surprised by the shocking numbers on inequality - they are already working to fight it. Let us all get on their side.
