Global do-gooders may have a new cause de jour. Bill Gates is stamping out malaria, global rates of HIV/AIDs are starting to fall, and – let’s face it – climate change ain’t what it used to be. So will we all chatter about next?
Alcohol. If you want something new to get mad about, that’s it. Here’s why:
- Alcohol keeps the poor poor. People in poor countries spend a high percentage of income on alcohol. In Delhi, for example, it can be as much as 25% of family income.
- Alcohol hits the poor hardest. Alcohol-related mortality is often the highest among the poorest people. 2.5 million people die of alcohol related deaths each year, disproportionately in poor countries.
- Alcohol hits the youth. Other global health issues – tobacco, cholesterol, or hypertension – have a higher age profile. Alcohol hits the young: shockingly, in Latin America and Eastern Europe respectively, 36% and 41% of deaths among 15-29 year olds were due to alcohol use.
- Alcohol & HIV/AIDS. Nobody needs telling about the relationship between alcohol consumption and sexual judgment – and this hardly helps the fight against unsafe sexual practices. In South Africa, for example, alcohol attributable HIV/AIDS is the fourth highest cause (12%) of mortality.
- Drink-driving. Africa has by far the highest road-kill in the world – and some estimates say as much as half of this may be alcohol related. Ironically, this is only getting worse as the roads get better (and people can drive faster).
- Violence against women. In many parts of Africa, domestic violence is considered normal – and much of this is alcohol related.
- Alcohol drags on the economy. For all these reasons – death, illness, crime – alcohol places massive direct (cost of healthcare, policing) and indirect (lost productivity, social harm) costs on the economy of developing countries.
Most of these factoids are from the World Bank. So, that’s the story. That’s why the World Health Organization has started getting pushy on alcohol.
So, think it’s a good cause de jour? There are even some good villains – the brewery empires, squeezing cash from the pockets of the poor, oblivious to the consequences. Right?
There’s a couple of things wrong with this picture, I think.
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1. Alcohol isn’t the problem – abuse of alcohol is. Let’s not castigate a chemical compound many of us are very fond of. Let’s not be too quick to demonize an entire industry that brings us a lot of pleasure.
2. The breweries aren’t stupid – they need to watch out for their license to operate, and safeguard their long-term business. For example, SABMiller have done some great work in South Africa – it would be great to see much more of this.
3. Much of it is home brew. 50% of alcohol produced and consumed is not commercially produced or consumed – such as the men in the image above, drinking homemade African beer (umqombothi) in South Africa. Who do we shout at about that?
4. Anyway, who are “we” to be telling people in Africa how much they should drink? First “we” lecture them about sex, now we’re telling them not to get drunk and beat their wives? Joking aside, there are some (well-meaning) colonial undertones from the World Bank and WHO – not a new thing, but let’s not get preachy on alcohol.
Anyway, it’s a interesting one to get stuck into. It’s an ideal candidate for a big bold initiative…
Image from the Langa Township outside of Capetown, South Africa, from fred_d_vedder’s photostream.
Filed under: Alcohol, Drugs, Economics, Education, Youth | Tags: Alcohol, digital, digital natives, Drugs, Education, lost generation, RSA, Youth, YouTube
A few of us from Mother went to the Lost Generation talk at the RSA last week, where the economist David Blanchflower warned of the “lull before the storm” in youth unemployment. Currently it’s 1 in 5, and set to rise. This is a big deal, he says: it could leave permanent social and economic damage on an entire generation.
Interesting to see the allergic reaction from Ruby Pseudo to the language of “lost generations”. Here she is, speaking up:
We have the tools; the abilities; the knowledge, to succeed in an increasingly digital world – we are fast thinking, forward thinking, adept and mobile. We are the net generation and, by that, the most powerful generation ever [and we’re the ones that are in trouble?!]
Ruby’s point is that the world of work needs to adapt to a generation with a different set of skills. It’s not just a macro economics question of job creation: as Miles Templeman of the Institute of Directors put it in the discussion after the talk, the old jobs are going, and they’re not coming back. The challenge is to find new ways of working, more flexible and engaging modes of employment.
All this sounds good, but something’s not right. Last week we spent a couple of hours talking to 16 year olds from local Hackney schools. None of them had a clue (or much interest) in what happens when school finishes – let alone any ideas about the future. These are the kids that the President of the National Union of Students Wes Streeting focused on during the talk – the ones at risk of real, lasting social exclusion, drug and alcohol abuse, etc.
When we asked them what would be their ideal job, there was a pretty clear answer: testing computer games. It made me think of Steve Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good For You: the technology/media/culture environment young people are growing up in is teaching them to new cognitive skills – skills which aren’t being engaged by the world of work.
If the way that young peoples minds work is changing, shouldn’t the world of school change too? Instead, we have an epidemic of Ritalin prescription in this country – in some towns, as many as one in seven children under 16 are prescribed Ritalin (source). This is the lost generation: thousands of young people being pathologised for the convenience of doctors, teachers and parents.
It’s the good old Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants generation gap. It’s not just the world of work that needs to change, the world of learning does too. As the US group Partnership for 21st Century Skills puts it, “today’s education system faces irrelevance unless we bridge the gap between how students live and how they learn”.
Before we start getting all “Learning 2.0″, let’s get some perspective. We asked the 16 year olds we met what they’re looking at on YouTube at the moment: as one of them said, “I just type in FUNNY SHIT and see what happens”. We thought we’d entertain ourselves and our clients by running together a montage of the clips they talked about…. LYAO!
“Dole Street” image grabbed from David Blanchflower’s RSA Presentation. Any YouTube copyright infringements unintentional!
