What makes a country underdeveloped?

The world is still very much segregated, even until today. The terms “First World” and “Third World” which were introduced by Alfred Sauvy in one of his articles called “Three Worlds, One Planet” in 1952, are still popular and heard often up until now. Undeniably, most people knows which countries we are referring to when they hear those terms. The “First World” countries, which some also call “the West”, refers to wealthy and developed countries such as Australia, the United States, and countries in the Western Europe. On the other hand, the less-developed (or even underdeveloped) and poorer countries are called the “Third World” by so many people. And that makes me wonder. How could one part of the world be so rich and have everything, while on the other part, so unfortunate and have nothing?

What contributes to their underdevelopment?

During the class earlier this month, we discussed about the factors that make a country developed. We figured out some of the indicators, such as proper healthcare, easy access to basic needs, safety for everyone, good education system, etc. Apparently, that’s not always the case. However, I think it will be different if we talk about what makes a country underdeveloped. Various aspects within an underdeveloped countries are most likely to be similar. Poverty, low education, no access to basic necessities such as clean water, electricity, food, etc. And the sad truth is that, according to the United Nations HDI in 2021/2022, 9 out of 10 most underdeveloped countries are in Africa. That is a shocking fact and makes me wonder even more, how could countries that re so rich of natural resources be so poor?

Some arguments that in my opinion makes sense are, first, due to the climate. African nations all have a tropical climate, which makes it easy to plant various kinds of plants and generate crops. And that leads to a lack of incentives to make efforts towards the environment, which results in less ambitious lives since the people already feel comfortable. The next thing contributing to a country’s underdevelopment is its past colonization history. According to more historically established standards, colonialism done by European and North American is largely to blame for maintaining the backwardness of weaker nations. The colonized countries must suffer now by competing against their old oppressors, who had taken the oppressed countries’ resources to enrich themselves.

However, does a colonized country have to be underdeveloped forever? We discussed about Botswana in one of our classes. Frankly speaking, I didn’t have much knowledge about Botswana, or other African countries. Things that I heard often is that most African nations are less developed than most part of the world (I apologize for generalizing). But then a discussion about Botswana was brought up. I was surprised that the country is even richer and stable than my home country, Indonesia. Everything about Botswana was contradictory to what I’ve known about African countries. But that’s good news! And that encourages me to do some more little researches about how to make a country rich from scratch, and within a short period of time as well. In a YouTube video that I watched, it concluded that Botswana could get to where they are now because of three reasons:

1. Be creative with what they have (in terms of natural resources)

Botswana is rich with diamonds, but they didn’t have the tool to mine and process the precious stones. What they did was took a lot of loan from the IMF to afford the tools, export the diamonds to other countries, and use that profit to pay their loan and keep the government going.

2. Be practical instead of ideological.

I don’t really understand much about this part. Therefore, I would just assume that the ruler of Botswana did just what they think were needed to be done in order to keep the country thriving instead of just stick to some (perhaps) obsolete ideology that are not relevant anymore to be applied to the current situation.

3. Protect civil liberties and the rule of law.

They hold a free and fair election to select the ruler of the country. In addition, the government is not so corrupt compared to other African countries. Botswana is known to be the least corrupt country in Africa.

My Final Thoughts

Learning from Botswana, I would conclude that there are some more factors that makes a country underdeveloped (besides the two factors that I’ve mentioned earlier). First, lack of creativity with their natural resources. In order to thrive, those underdeveloped countries need to figure out what they got to offer and the ways to benefit from them. Second, they are stuck within their ideologies. Leave all the old ideologies behind and just take actions. Determine the issues that your country face and focus on developing ways to solve them (but still be realistic). Lastly, corruption and not upholding the law. The money that the government has must be used for the benefit of the people, not for personal use and neglect their obligations as a leader or ruler.