In the traffic of Karachi’s bustling population of 18 million residents crammed into an area of only 3,527 km sq., you can see all the colours of social stratification, economic evolution, and political instability of a developing country….

…This is not to say that it is not a culturally rich and diverse city, but it scares me that we have come to accept the strife with the social atmosphere. I drive by the seashore, and paralleled by the millionaire mansions on my right, I see people curled up in sheets, sleeping on the grass to my left. At the turn of the signal, with traffic officers desperately trying to get people to actually stop at a red light, a mother gives her baby a sip of water dripping from the back pipe of a truck, while I have my bottle of mineral water in hand. People line up at the polling station just down the street, and little kids wave their party’s flag on election day; yet, just the night before, gunshots were fired from behind a tree outside the mosque where my little brother and other children were studying. There is something fundamentally wrong with this picture, so I stare out of the car window and wonder how the world has become so distorted.

Having come to Pakistan from Canada, my Western mind was shocked by the tremendous differences between what I saw in the West and what

I’m seeing in the East. Yes, there is poverty in developed countries, and many times I have walked down the streets of Toronto and wondered about what brought an amazing artist to draw with chalk on the side of the road. I remember, from an introductory sociology class I took, that a large number of the homeless population is made up of single mothers. As distressing as I found that scenario, my fears for the world were heightened by seeing children around every corner in Karachi performing labour and asking for money to survive on flour with its rising crop prices. How do you tell a small child to “Get a job, kid”? It’s a ridiculous answer to poverty when you think about it that way. I imagine that such a difficult situation exists in the majority of the world: the United Nations Statistics Division, although unofficially, categorizes only Japan, Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Europe as “developed.” This is only a handful of the world’s population.

When I stopped to think about how finding a solution to the myriad of problems that plague nations struggling to develop, I got overwhelmed. I think this is a common initial reaction — to think that the world is inevitably flawed and that there is nowhere to begin fixing it. When I thought about Pakistan, for example, my reasoning was that a vicious and unbreakable pattern exists. There is a lot of lawlessness amongst the public: you can get away with driving on the wrong side of the road as long as you have a few rupees in case you have to bribe a police officer. Then again, many honest people can’t survive if they don’t keep up with at least some of the corruption. That same police officer might just pull you over for no reason and hold your license until you pay him, so there isn’t much incentive to do the right thing.

Once, one of my friends jokingly asked if Pakistan had a mafia, and I replied that it was called the government. In all seriousness, progress is bound to be difficult for the many countries whose leadership is based in corruption. Leaders who would make a difference are faced with a public that is not accustomed to trusting the long-term outcome of such sacrifices as paying taxes. The corruption of the public is both caused by and causes, or at least supports, the corruption of the government, making it easy to feel that reversing this cycle may be a lost cause. In contrast, were developed countries born with integrity? This is a very narrow-minded view, and the world would have no chance of progress with it.

Any feelings of apathy I had were challenged by my exposure to an empowering convocation address on the overwhelming gap between the rich and poor given in May 2006 at Columbia University by His Highness the Aga Khan, Chairman of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN).

AKDN is one of the larger non-profit and non-government development agencies in the world and “focuses on health, education, culture, rural development, institution-building and the promotion of economic development. It is dedicated to improving living conditions and opportunities for the poor, without regard to their faith, origin or gender.” The speech discussed the role of democracy as a building block for socioeconomic progress, with emphasis on four areas of possible improvement: more flexible definitions of democracy, greater involvement of humanitarian institutions within civil society, public responsibility for fair communication and better education, and a sense of personal integrity and ethical framework upon which to base our practices.

His Highness described how, “[f]or the developing world, the past half-century has been a time of recurring hope and frequent disappointment. Great waves of change have washed over the landscape — from the crumbling of colonial hegemonies in mid century to the recent collapse of communist empires. But too often, what rushed in to replace the old order were empty hopes — not only the false allure of state socialism, non-alignment, and single-party rule, but also the false glories of romantic nationalism and narrow tribalism, and the false dawn of runaway individualism.” The developing world has been significantly hindered by the instability of the shifting regimes of world order.

To understand the correlation between socioeconomic progress and government stability, I turned to the World Bank for some information. In an article entitled “Countries Emerging from Conflict,” the organization’s research shows that many conflict-ridden countries such as Sierra Leone need severe restructuring through outside aid. Otherwise approximately 40 per cent of them will only sustain peace for ten years at most. Patterns show that these countries receive external aid for the first few years of crises and that the funding then swiftly declines. In order to sustain change, external aid efforts must be longer lasting. The World Bank study suggested that aid be distributed efficiently and with long-term interests in mind, with one analysis being that, “[t]he risk of civil war drops when institutions are able to enforce property rights and the rule of law. Research indicates that to mitigate conflict, the focus should be on building or strengthening such institutions rather than on poverty reduction.” Another forewarning is given against “forced democratization,” which is an unpredictable and likely improbable means to long-term stability. His Highness the Aga Khan also expands on this idea in relaying that there is not only one right form of democracy, and people, not just governments, play an active role in the success of their democracies.

As clichéd as many people may perceive the idea of world peace to be, it seems to me that peace is truly at the forefront of progress. With continuous conflict, a country has slim chances of moving upwardly through the stages of development. Political and economic stability go hand in hand because severe socio-economic stratification causes great political unrest. In Canada, no one has to worry about staying out late the night before elections, while in Pakistan it has become common knowledge to take safety precautions around election time. In my opinion, a greater degree of fairness permits successful democracies to avoid some of the problems of their developing counterparts, allowing the poor a voice to balance the political will of the wealthy. In unstable and corrupt political frameworks, the poor often feel that threats and violence are their only means for political influence. This civil disaffection, combined with a widespread lack of education, leaves the country trapped in a position of both political and economic unrest.

In this very complicated picture, I feel that we should recognize the value of education as a means to raise awareness about how progress is truly possible. The measurement of literacy and enrollment rates is one of the three aspects of the United Nations Development Programme’s calculation of the Human Poverty Index (HPI), the other two factors being life expectancy and standard of living. “We must do more to prepare the leaders of the twenty-first century for economic life in a global marketplace, for cultural life in pluralistic societies, for political life in complex democracies,” states the Aga Khan. I think that real education goes beyond reading textbooks in a classroom and includes more experience and analysis of what we must do with our knowledge. An entire world beyond the university — the majority of the world — needs this empowered knowledge.

With this in mind, I now realize that my oversimplified attempt to understand the fundamental flaws of the world is not really as important as my opening of that car window through which I watch and wonder. My friend and I discuss at our milestones how we are one step closer to wanting to go save the world. Maybe we cannot end global poverty or implement world peace, but the realization that the world needs saving is something, I think. Wanting to save the world is our first clue that it is something we can go out and do.

Anyone coming?