WWI and WWII transformed Europe and the U.S. to high-tech societies and since that time the world accelerated steadily and gradually in a global track of developments. The emergence of modern societies became more and more dependent on knowledge and technology with clear divergence into two tracks with growing gaps between them. These tracks generated what is currently known as the developed and developing countries with enormous and huge imparities on all levels and scales.
It is a misconception that poverty is the lack of economy to feed population, it is rather a symptom of poor societies and the real proble is under-nutrition in knowledge which is the only instrument for development, technology and sustainable developments.
The root of poverty is the absence of knowledge and all of us know the value of education especially higher education, e.g. undergraduate university education, where specific and practical merits of relevance to the market and life quality are given. Research which typically starts on graduate and post-graduate levels, is a universal instrument for extending higher education in whatever is needed for turning the unknowns to knowns and thereby extending and inlarging the market and improving life quality and life standards on all levels and scales. History shows that modern welfare societies with diversified markets, high living-quality and living-standards, enjoy high quality of education, innovation and technology where people can define, formulate and practice their knowledge to serve and get served with high-quality and high-standard in focus.
The core problems in the world is the ever accelerating competition between the developed countries to further secure and improve their economies which continuously generate larger and larger gaps between the developed and developing countries. The huge rates of poverty in the developing countries is further enhanced by enormous outflow of people from the developing countries to fill technology and market gaps in the developed countries, either permanently or occasionally/temporary. Furthermore, the interactions and dynamics between higher education systems in the developed and developing countries do not involve synergies to promote coupling of science and technology to society, market and population needs in the developing countries. Such interactions and dynamics are merely designed for the conditional promotion of science and technology in the developed countries. Careful examination of promotion systems in higher education sectors around the world, for example, shows that education and research in science and technology in the developing countries do not generate the necessary labor to solve local and regional needs. On the contrary higher-education- promotion systems in the developing countries are counterproductive on many levels with severe negative and destructive impacts for the national and regional socio-economic developments.
Much of the focus in the developing countries is on low-quality children education which indeed is not enough to eradice poverty even with best economic aid-resources from UN, international foreign aid-organizations and foundations, e.g. Bill Gates. These organizations follow the same inherited pattern and policies “business as usual” that are conducted again and again by the failing higher education systems around the world.
If change is going to happen in eradicating poverty we need first to modernize our education systems. We can not afford having the majority of the world population being blind-consumers of world natural resources. Let us start-with providing future generation better chances and possibilities for a future which will never look the same as today (http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/education; http://saveourschoolsnz.com/tag/child-poverty/).
