RA: Eliminate Poverty?

"If We Could Electrify Africa, We Would Eliminate Poverty in a Decade"
By Tom Setter, retired Orthopedic Surgeon, Rotarian (39 years) from Anthem, Arizona
http://www.geni.org/globalenergy/projects/news/press_releases/rotary/if-we-could-electrify-africa.shtml

Audience: Rotary club members
WATCO Working to provide electricity to Africa on poverty? Your help in providing electricity to Africa will help eliminate poverty there because when you give them the resources they need, they can learn to work their own way out of poverty.

First, I have to comment that the logic of this article is extremely weak. Setter predicts that Africans will work their way out of poverty just like his grandfather did. But Africa and Minnesota are two very different places, and the life of a farmer in the midwest is not analogous to the life of most people living in Africa. There are no reasons given for choosing a decade as the appropriate time-frame for eliminating poverty, except for that is how long it took in the United States. But, even in the US, we have poverty. Maybe we could eliminate poverty for some people, or even for many people, but it is hard to prove that you can actually "eliminate poverty".

The argument relies heavily on emotion, the story about his grandfather is supposed to help the audience see the problem in Africa in American Dream terms. If only they had a way to start, the people could work and save and eventually prosper. This is appealing to members of Rotary Club because they like to do work for other people to make a difference. Making great leaps in humanitarian service is a very exciting thing for members of this club. Setter also offers snapshots of life in a village without electricity and without water. He highlights the difficulty of life and cites this as his principle reason for calling club members to action. It is primarily an emotional appeal.

I think that the author is credible, however, to his audience. His call for help in this project is motivated by non-rational factors. He isn't doing this to earn a profit. He is doing it out of pure compassion for the people he serves. To Rotarians, this is a necessary component of any successful argument because a self-interested author would probably offend the majority of Rotarians.

The argument is very typical of something that any international humanitarian service giver would say in trying to recruit others to help in his cause. The argument is relevant to his audience, it is something they all care about. But I do think that Setter's argument is flawed in its accuracy. There is no data supporting what he claims. His main points (the ones in bold) are very much undocumented and unsupported by any details or scientific investigation. We have only his eye-witness accounting, which is limited. As I read this article, I was not convinced that Setter knows what he is talking about, but there is a significant amount of emotional pressure to support him anyway. I think that for most Rotary Club members, this article would be persuasive enough to at least provoke thought and even public discussion about the matter. And that is probably Setter's goal, to raise awareness of the problem and encourage other people to help in whatever ways they can. I believe that despite the unsupported claims and faulty logic, this argument has probably been partially responsible for sending people to Africa to work on the power lines.