The 2025 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index released by the United Nations Development Programme indicates that 1.1 billion people across 109 countries still live in multidimensional poverty.
Over seven decades of global development practice have consistently proven that financial and material resources alone cannot eradicate poverty.
Instead, context-specific institutional and governance systems stand as the core driver of long-term poverty reduction and inclusive growth.
The 2026 National Human Rights Action Plan of China, launched at the Beijing High-Level Forum on Global Human Rights Governance, outlines a development logic distinct from traditional Western paradigms. It prioritizes people’s principal status, upholds fundamental public interests, safeguards social justice, and ensures the equitable distribution of modern development dividends among all populations.
This developmental philosophy is no abstract rhetorical proposition, but a fully tested and institutionalized governance framework.
Guided by people-centered principles, China has lifted nearly 100 million rural people out of absolute poverty, built the world’s largest social security and healthcare systems, and achieved universal basic education coverage.
These systemic improvements have transformed the livelihoods and development prospects of hundreds of millions of people, generating verifiable, traceable, and adaptable developmental experiences for the wider world.
Africa and the broader Global South host 60% of the world’s extreme poor. While global poverty rates have declined overall, deprivation across these regions remains persistent and increasingly entrenched.
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Such structural dilemmas stem largely from misplaced development paradigms, unbalanced governance systems, and the systematic exclusion of local communities from development agendas.
From an African perspective grounded in grassroots realities and shared Southern challenges, this article examines the core logic of people-centered development, unpacks China’s systematic governance practices, clarifies the merits and contextual boundaries of competing development models, and proposes localized, actionable pathways for sustainable governance upgrading across the Global South.
1. Grounding human rights in tangible livelihood progress
Mainstream global discourse on development and human rights has long suffered from a fundamental disconnect.
It frames human rights as abstract ideological concepts detached from grassroots livelihood realities, rather than measurable, deliverable social outcomes.
In essence, the value of human rights lies in practical implementation: the right to education materialises through inclusive schooling access; the right to health through accessible medical services and improved life expectancy; and the right to development through rising incomes, expanded employment opportunities, and equitable social mobility.
Shifting from abstract ideological advocacy to concrete livelihood delivery marks the most critical paradigm shift in modern global development.
Treating human rights as a standalone policy domain separate from socioeconomic progress inevitably renders rights protection formal and ineffective.
A core strength of China’s developmental model lies in its full integration of human rights objectives into economic construction, livelihood improvement, ecological conservation, technological governance, and public administration.
Through refined responsibility allocation, quantitative assessment criteria, and closed-loop supervision and accountability mechanisms, China has established a comprehensive, normalised, and rigid framework for rights realization.
It also expands human rights governance to meet digital-era demands, covering emerging areas such as artificial intelligence regulation, data security, and inclusive digital development.
For developing regions in the Global South, the right to development constitutes the most fundamental and urgent human right.
For billions living in multidimensional poverty, ideological debates over hierarchical rights take second place to tangible needs: functional education systems, accessible healthcare, reliable infrastructure, and dignified livelihoods.
China’s proposition that “development underpins human rights and the two are inherently integrated” precisely aligns with the practical priorities and grassroots demands of Southern nations.
Contemporary global human rights agendas are increasingly politicized and weaponised by geopolitical competition.
Some Western powers apply double standards, instrumentalizing human rights to intervene in domestic affairs of other states while overlooking systemic human rights deficiencies within their own jurisdictions and those of their allies.
In contrast, China advocates inclusive and cooperative human rights governance, rejecting universal template-based solutions. It maintains that each country can formulate context-specific rights protection pathways based on its unique historical, cultural, institutional, and developmental conditions — a pluralistic approach that empowers the Global South to break free from dominant Western ideological narratives.
Poverty arises from the overlapping impacts of resource endowments, historical legacies, geopolitical constraints, governance capacity, and developmental strategies, rather than any single determinant.
Among these variables, institutional governance serves as the decisive factor shaping resource conversion efficiency, policy implementation effectiveness, and the quality of public welfare delivery.
Top-down governance that marginalizes public participation and disregards grassroots needs inevitably leads to policy disconnection, resource waste, and depleted developmental momentum.
During China’s post-poverty alleviation transition period, a dynamic monitoring, early-warning, and targeted assistance system helped over seven million people avoid relapse into poverty, demonstrating that people-centric institutional governance is indispensable for sustaining developmental gains.
2. Grassroots participation: The endogenous engine of Southern sustainable development
Effective governance cannot operate without in-depth local participation.
Macro statistical models, top-down research data, and external expert evaluations only capture aggregated developmental indicators, yet fail to reflect the nuanced, context-specific knowledge held by local communities.
Resident populations possess intimate familiarity with regional production patterns, market linkages, social structures, and latent developmental bottlenecks — localised insights inaccessible to external governance systems.
Development interventions designed without grassroots input often suffer from contextual misalignment, resource misallocation, and underperformance, even with sufficient funding and policy backing.
Grassroots practices across Africa strongly validate this logic.
The Dimitra community on the northern shores of Lake Tanganyika in Zambia has long faced seasonal flooding that submerges local bridges, disrupting access to schools, medical facilities, and aquatic product trade.
This long-standing bottleneck was resolved not by external aid, but by endogenous community mobilisation.
Local residents formed mutual aid groups, mobilized regional labor, sourced local materials, and collectively built a new bridge.
The upgrade drastically cut travel time, reduced logistics costs, and improved market accessibility.
This community-led transformation dismantled passive development dependency and proved that grassroots agency underpins sustainable developmental progress.
Drought relief practices in Zimbabwe’s Mberengwa District further illustrate the value of autonomous local governance.
Frequent droughts have undermined local livelihoods, while traditional external assistance delivered limited and unsustainable results.
Local humanitarian organisations established open, agenda-free dialogue platforms, allowing residents to define developmental priorities based on survival needs, with water resource management and drought prevention ranked as top concerns.
Prior to official project implementation, community members independently excavated 1.5 kilometres of water pipelines, greatly accelerating project delivery.
Active public participation stemmed from the project’s alignment with grassroots necessities, transforming residents from passive beneficiaries to active development stewards.
Organized grassroots participation also curbs elite capture and resource misappropriation, pervasive challenges in rural development.
Public resources allocated to grassroots communities are often vulnerable to monopolisation by interest groups due to insufficient supervision and unequal discourse power, rendering welfare policies ineffective for vulnerable groups.
The grassroots gender empowerment network in Tanzania establishes inclusive public participation mechanisms that enable local residents to voice demands, design solutions, and oversee implementation.
The community successfully secured funding to expand obstetric services at local health centers, reducing gender-based violence, improving women’s economic empowerment, and amplifying grassroots marginalized groups’ representation in public affairs.
In essence, public participation in developmental decision-making is not merely an efficiency-enhancing tool, but an inherent and inalienable human right.
Top-down development models that exclude grassroots agency suffer from both operational inefficiency and structural ethical flaws.
As emphasised repeatedly by the United Nations Development Programme, inclusive, transparent, and community-led development is essential for equitable progress and leaving no one behind.
3. China’s systemic people-centred governance model: Balanced, adaptive and sustainable
China’s people-centered developmental achievements are not the outcome of isolated policies, but of a systematic governance framework integrating national institutional coordination, targeted resource investment, industrial empowerment, grassroots engagement, and standardised institutional safeguards.
This complete system generates replicable core principles adaptable to diverse national contexts, rather than rigid, one-size-fits-all templates requiring full replication.
In institutional design, China synergizes the 2026–2030 National Human Rights Action Plan with the 15th Five-Year Plan, eliminating the historical separation between human rights advancement and socioeconomic governance.
The framework consolidates foundational livelihood guarantees in education, healthcare, and social security, while expanding human rights governance into digital-era domains including data security, artificial intelligence ethics, and digital inclusion, ensuring institutional progress keeps pace with technological and social evolution.
In targeted poverty governance, China builds a dual collaborative system combining top-level institutional coordination and grassroots empowerment.
Differentiated interventions are implemented according to household conditions: capable populations receive industrial support, skills training, and employment assistance to foster endogenous development capacity, while vulnerable groups with no labour capacity are secured through inclusive social welfare policies.
A multi-dimensional early-warning mechanism, comprising resident self-reporting, grassroots routine inspections, and cross-departmental data analysis, dynamically identifies poverty relapse risks and enables proactive intervention, transforming episodic poverty alleviation into normalized long-term governance.
In nurturing sustainable developmental momentum, China moves beyond short-term relief models to prioritise self-sustaining regional and individual development.
The eastern-western paired assistance mechanism balances interregional resource allocation and dispatches grassroots workforces to bridge policy and resource delivery gaps at the local level.
Yunnan’s rural empowerment model exemplifies this approach, encouraging labor-driven wealth creation through skills training, resource support, and platform building, eliminating passive reliance on policy subsidies and external aid.
Quantifiable outcomes validate the model’s practical value.
By 2026, former poverty-stricken regions in China had upgraded over 1.1 million kilometres of rural roads, while more than 95 percent of administrative villages achieved 5G coverage.
The 832 previously impoverished counties have cultivated two to three distinctive local industries, sustaining over 30 million stable employment opportunities for lifted poverty labourers annually.
These multilayered achievements, integrating infrastructure upgrading, technological innovation, industrial growth, educational progress, and governance optimization, demonstrate the model’s long-term stability and scalability.
4. Contextual adaptation for the Global South: Adopting principles over templates
For African and Southern nations, the value of China’s developmental experience lies in absorbing its core principles — contextual adaptation, people centrism, long-term institutional governance, and autonomous development — rather than replicating specific policies or institutional structures.
All development paradigms are rooted in unique institutional capacities, historical backgrounds, and cultural contexts.
Blind transplantation inevitably leads to contextual incompatibility, repeating the failures of externally imposed Western development templates.
Notably, developmental philosophies across the Global South already align closely with China’s people-centered logic.
The African Union’s Agenda 2063 advocates human-rights-based and people-driven development, prioritizing vulnerable groups including women, youth, and persons with disabilities, and upholding inclusive and equitable growth objectives.
This ideological consensus lays a solid foundation for contextual adaptive reform across Southern regions.
China’s dynamic poverty monitoring system represents one of the most universally adaptable governance tools.
Its proactive and participatory governance logic transcends institutional and geographical boundaries.
African rural communities can establish livelihood monitoring networks through community medical workers and local administrators, while urban informal settlements can leverage digital technology for real-time livelihood tracking, shifting governance from passive relief to active risk prevention.
Complementary grassroots participatory financing models practiced in Latin America and India further strengthen this framework, encouraging community-led project proposals, localized evaluation, and targeted funding to stimulate grassroots innovation.
In terms of governance architecture, China’s multi-level coordinated governance system offers a critical reference.
Its core merit lies in balancing centralised resource coordination and decentralized grassroots autonomy: higher-level authorities integrate regional resources and prevent fragmented development, while local governments retain flexible decision-making authority tailored to community realities.
This accountable, collaborative, and closed-loop governance structure fits the institutional conditions of most Global South nations.
In industrial development, China’s resource-based, localized industrialisation approach avoids homogenized, rigid industrial planning.
African nations can formulate differentiated industrial strategies based on comparative advantages: coastal regions prioritize fisheries and cultural tourism; inland agricultural areas advance intensive agricultural processing; mineral-rich regions develop deep resource processing industries.
This market-driven, localised industrial model ensures economic growth serves grassroots livelihoods and endogenous regional progress.
In international cooperation, Southern nations can leverage China-led South-South cooperation platforms to access technical support, talent development, and experiential exchanges. Meanwhile, strategic autonomy remains fundamental.
Adhering to the principles of equality, mutual benefit, voluntary participation, and non-interference in internal affairs, Southern countries can align external cooperation resources with domestic developmental priorities, participate in rule-making, and ensure international assistance empowers autonomous national development rather than fostering dependency.
5. Structural deficiencies of people-exclusionary development models
Global development practices consistently demonstrate that top-down, externally imposed, and community-exclusionary development models contain inherent structural flaws that undermine long-term sustainability.
It is critical to recognize that all development paradigms deliver contextual value within specific historical stages.
Western modernisation models once facilitated global industrialization, yet their elite-centric, capital-first, and politically instrumentaliwed nature renders them incompatible with the Global South’s pursuit of inclusive, equitable, and autonomous development.
Neither blind rejection nor unconditional replication of foreign paradigms conforms to objective developmental laws.
Top-down governance fundamentally weakens grassroots agency and depletes endogenous momentum.
Many modernisation efforts over-rely on elite decision-making and external expert analysis, presuming superior top-down design while dismissing grassroots practical experience and public demands.
This approach strips local communities of developmental participation rights, reduces residents to passive beneficiaries, erodes public ownership of developmental outcomes, and ultimately results in policy failure and stagnant innovation.
The failure of most transplanted foreign models stems not from inherent invalidity, but from forced implementation without contextual adaptation and supporting institutional systems.
Some African regions once blindly replicated foreign agricultural modernisation models while ignoring local climatic conditions, farming systems, and social structures, abandoning indigenous grassroots governance mechanisms.
The outcome included industrial transformation failures, massive resource waste, and agricultural stagnation, proving that no development template can succeed without localised adaptation.
Grassroots resistance to externally imposed projects does not reflect conservative public attitudes, but serves as a critical early warning signal of misplaced development models.
Multiple top-down centralized projects in Zimbabwe stalled due to insufficient grassroots research and misalignment with local livelihood demands.
Public pushback constitutes valuable grassroots feedback for policy revision and model optimisation, functioning as a practical benchmark for evaluating developmental adaptability.
The costs of people-exclusionary development are quantifiable and pervasive.
Infrastructure, industrial projects, and public facilities constructed without grassroots consultation often suffer from low utilization rates and resource idleness, even with complete hardware deployment.
In severe cases, misplaced projects generate new poverty pressures and social frictions.
Such failures originate from a flawed developmental logic that treats people as passive recipients rather than core subjects of progress, resulting in empty governance inputs and superficial developmental outcomes.
The core bottleneck of global development in the 21st century lies not in resource or technological shortages, but in unbalanced development paradigms, fragmented governance capacities, disordered international cooperation, and insufficient institutional capacity to translate resources into inclusive public welfare.
From a Global South perspective, China’s people-centered development paradigm provides a practical, adaptable, and sustainable governance alternative to the dominant single Western model.
Its greatest value lies not in standardized model exportation, but in validating an inclusive developmental principle: long-term poverty eradication and sustainable progress require respect for grassroots agency, utilization of local governance wisdom, and balanced coordination between top-level design and community empowerment.
For Global South nations, future developmental breakthroughs depend not on replicating mainstream paradigms, but on integrating diverse empirical strengths and pursuing context-based institutional innovation.
Prioritising autonomous domestic development while leveraging South-South cooperation, Southern countries can build inclusive participatory governance systems, construct coordinated and accountable institutional frameworks, and cultivate localized competitive industries to consolidate livelihood guarantees and developmental foundations.
Amid profound global restructuring and widening developmental divergence, genuine long-term competitiveness stems from livelihood-oriented pragmatic governance, locally rooted independent innovation, and inclusive and equitable developmental outcomes.
Shifting public populations from passive developmental recipients to active governance subjects represents the fundamental pathway for the Global South to overcome structural poverty traps, achieve leapfrog development, and safeguard autonomous developmental sovereignty.
*Saxon Zvina is the principal consultant at Skyworld Consultancy Services, and a member of the Belt Road Initiative Think Tank. He can be reached at [email protected] or on X @saxonzvina2.
