Over the past few years, and even at present, Anguillians have been hearing quite a lot about poverty assessment, and some persons whose households were randomly selected for the purposes of the information collecting questionnaires have become somewhat uneasy about the matter.

Some were heard complaining that the surveys were an invasion of their privacy and way of life. Taking into account the buoyancy of the economy, full employment, relatively high salaries and wages and the high standard of living, others have declared that there is no poverty in Anguilla.

Well, that is really not the case. Even in the wealthiest of nations there is a multiplicity of cases of teeming poverty. How much is this not present in Anguilla, a small island with a history of having been the poorest in the Caribbean and was therefore late in achieving some measure of prosperity which is yet to be experienced by, and trickled down to, many residents? The distribution and filtering down of wealth to all levels of a society is not an immediate achievement and so, for a long time, there are always what may be referred to as “the haves and the haves not.”

Surveys like the poverty assessment are useful measuring rods to monitor how a small island as Anguilla is faring socially and economically, bearing up under the varied impacts from within and without, what access persons in the various communities are having to modern amenities and services, income, employment and so on.

If Anguilla is to seriously address some of its social problems, poverty assessment must be one of the matters to take into account for various obvious reasons. We have been in the unfortunate position of having financial aid cut off by Britain on the notion that there was no poverty on the island and that such financial assistance was better to be made available to other places where there were greater needs.

This is not just a matter of complaint. What is being said is that one cannot simply look around on the surface and conclude that there is no poverty. It takes a well-organised technical study to do that and the effort being made in Anguilla with the assistance of the Caribbean Development Bank is a plausible one. According to the consultants, it will provide a data base line which can be the genesis of a concerted attempt to address some, if not all, of the situations and work towards alleviating poverty among communities and individuals thereby enhancing the quality of life for all.
There are pockets of poverty in Anguilla which must be searched out although the means of how this may effectively be remedied are unclear and must be the subject of careful analysis. To be poor is nothing to be ashamed of; in fact one can be proud at the same time. What we can be ashamed of, is to know that there are problems but to do nothing about them. Let us therefore support the poverty assessment work on the island, devise ways of dealing with the situation and feel good about what we are doing. How poor is Anguilla? Let the surveys and the cooperation of our people determine this.

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