By Kenrick Quashie
Recently, I was in a conversation with a very good friend. We were talking about school registration fees and whether they should be reduced or waived, and how those decisions benefit the poor.
In the middle of the discussion, he paused, then said “Every time we talk about these things, it’s always poor people this, poor people that, poor people the other. When are the poor going to stop being poor?” His question wasn’t said out of disregard. It wasn’t said to dismiss struggle. It was a moment of frustration and possibly clarity. Because in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the language of policy is almost always framed around “the poor”. Whether it is education assistance, housing support, or public spending, the question we often hear is: is this benefiting the poor?
I believe the framing we use matters. How we frame it can limit the conversation and risk turning poverty into a permanent category that needs to be managed year after year rather than a condition to be reduced over time. Take education, for example. For years, there has been a strong push to expand access. More students are going off to study, more degrees are being earned, more emphasis is on higher education as the pathway forward. But what happens after? Too many return home and find an economy that cannot absorb them into the fields they trained for. Skills go underutilised. Degrees sit on shelves. And in the meantime, the cost of living continues to rise. Food, utilities, and transportation are placing pressure on already tight incomes. So even after doing what the system encouraged by studying, qualifying, and returning home, the outcome is often the same. Limited upward movement.
Or consider the broader structure of the economy. Small businesses face high operating costs, taxation pressures, and limited scale. Access to capital remains uneven. Entire sectors like agriculture and light manufacturing struggle with consistency, market access, and competitiveness. These are not abstract issues. They are linked to whether people can move from a low-income status to stability.
But even here, policy alone does not determine outcomes. Simply having a university degree does not create mobility unless it is applied. An opportunity does not translate into income unless it is pursued. Support does not create progress unless it is paired with expectation.
The structural challenges are real, but they are not the entire story. At some point, mobility requires individuals to engage differently with what is available. To build skills beyond the minimum. To treat income not just as something to spend, but something to grow. To see work not only as survival, but as a pathway to advancement. This shift is not an easy one.
However, without it, even well-intentioned policies will produce limited results. There is a quote that often comes to mind, that can sound a bit uncomfortable: “the best thing you can do for poor people is not to be one of them”. It is not said here as a judgment. Rather it is said as a statement about capacity.
When individuals move beyond poverty, they expand what they can do for themselves and others. They create businesses. They employ people. They invest. They contribute in ways that are not possible when they are struggling to meet basic needs. This brings us back to the central issue. If every policy is judged only by how it supports the poor in the moment, without equal focus on how it moves people out of poverty over time, then we risk building a system that sustains dependency rather than mobility.
Are we truly creating pathways into the middle class or reinforcing the conditions that keep people where they are? Are we aligning education with real economic demand? Are we building an environment where effort is rewarded with advancement? And are individuals, in turn, prepared to meet those opportunities with discipline and intention? Until all sides of that equation are properly addressed, namely, policy, structure, and personal response, the outcomes will not change. We will continue to talk about the poor and far too few will stop being poor.