Are the poor the most qualified to represent their interests within the policymaking process?

Ask yourself this: who is going to have the most credibility when discussing poverty - a politican or academic who flies from one country to another stopping at decent hotels and associating with their peers, or people who live with the reality of poverty every day? One classic example of where this goes wrong is in the aftermath of WW2, when the British hoped to develop the economy of what was then called Tanganyika and we now know as Tanazania. A Briton who worked for a Unilever subsidiary reckoned groundnuts could be grown in the country, and £25 million was spent preparing the land for the growth of the groundnuts, based on the assumption that modern western farming methods would be more effective than what local people had been doing for centuries. The project was a disaster, and when it became apparent that was the case the British solution was to make the work run on military lines. At no point in any of this expensive fiasco was the generations-long knowledge of local people about the land they lived on taken into account. In the end, the use of inappropriate heavy machinery in the area helped to make it into a dust bowl where nothing would grow - all thanks to the input of wealthy foreign experts.