Social Capital — when poor can be rich

I wondered when the lessons from our West Africa shoot would take hold. Didn’t take long at all for me to see where in Canada we are poor, and where they are rich.

A few days after our shoot in The Gambia, I had a meeting with another client for a video project on Population Health - a view of health care delivery that considers all the “social determinants of health”: education, economy, environment, etc. The client mentioned another important health determinant called “social capital” — which is what you have when you are connected to your community, your family, your friends — the whole web of people who care about you. In The Gambia, what we saw was immense social capital.

People live in extended families, live in close proximity, share limited resources. In the Gambia they don’t seem to have homelessness as we do in our cities, nor elderly people who are sick and alone at home, not eating well, suffering falls and not taking medication properly. According to my Population Health client, the fact that the elderly live alone in our society is one of the biggest challenges for and strains on the health care system in Nova Scotia.

It’s a bit overly simplistic, I know, but my sense is that in The Gambia, the elderly are highly respected and valued in a way that we don’t see here. Old folks are pillars of the community, give history and context to their family and community life. The elders maintain their social capital. They have real value. They don’t have a fat RRSP in the bank to take care of them in retirement, but they have instead this complex web of people who will take care. And those people who take care of them also get value from the social capital flowing back to them from the elderly in the form of continuity, wisdom, perspective and knowledge.

It’s a richness that most Canadians can only envy.

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