Poor countries are poor because they are wasting their resources. As iqbal z quadir suggest, the main cause of the poverty is the country itself. Poor countries face problems such as hunger, low standard of living and trap in the poverty cycle for generations. Sometimes, they blamed the natural disasters they have experienced. However, in my view, all these are just excuses. The causes of such problems are corruption, poor governance and the wrong attitudes of the individual. Therefore, I agree that poor countries have mainly themselves to blame for the problems they face today.
Corruption is a major cause of the poverty and it occurs at all levels of the society, from the government to every citizen. Corruption causes people to ignore the rules and regulation in the country as what is useful is bribe. Corruption in government will lead to the government to implement policies which favour the rich and not helping the poor. This will worsen the problem of poverty cycle as rich will become richer and poor can only be poorer. In addition, corruption might means that the citizens will need to spend more money in order to receive goods and services. This will force families to buy lesser food and spend lesser money to increase their material standard of living. Thus leads to the rise of hunger, low standard of living and poverty cycle.
Another major factor is poor governance. A government is like the brain of a human body, an indispensable component of the country. It gives the directions to the country. Having a government with poor governance is just like having a brain cancer, which affects the country in a very negative way. Poor governance will waste the country’s resources as it did not plan how to use the resources wisely and is inefficient in carrying out the policies implemented. The country will then earn a lower income as lesser resources are available for them to use in production line. Even there is enough income, the government did not spend it on useful means such as improving the infrastructure, healthcare and education system, hence the country suffers low standard of living. For example, Nigeria earned more than half a trillion dollars in oil exports. Unfortunately, it tragically failed to translate rich resource endowment to improvement in the standard of living of her citizens hence 69 per cent of over 100 million of its citizens in the poverty bracket.

Attitude determines your altitude. This famous quote is extremely true especially to the individual in poor countries. If the problems faced by the poor countries can purely solve by giving money, it would not be a problem at the first place. The root cause of the poverty is the laziness of the individual. People dream to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in nice apartments but don't want to work hard to accomplish these things. Of course such dreams will never come true. As people are not work hard and smart enough, there will not be sufficient income given to they to purchase things they want. The worse is people find excuses for their laziness such as it is their fate to be poor. The consequence is that they will trap in the poverty cycle as they never believe that they can change their destiny. Hence, there is no one they can blame but theirsevles.
This is not to say there is no other factor leading to the problem they face today. One of the factors which uncontrollable is the natural disasters. When a country experiences tremendous natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunami, the infrastructures will be heavily damaged and lives of its residents are lost. This will results in hunger within the countries as food and clean water supplies are affected and the standard of living of the residents will sharply decline due to lack of funding and manpower to rebuilt the country.
However, international aid is usually provided to these countries. If the affected countries can make use of such resources usefully, they can easily encounter the problems they face. If not, they can only blame themselves for the problems they face. For example, after a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, governments and foundations from around the world have donated billions to help get the country back on its feet. However, Haiti did not become any better as due to the corruptions of the government, funds did not go to the hand of its people. Therefore, although experiencing natural disasters is the country’s fate, they can definitely do more to change their fate and solve the problem they face today.
In conclusion, the poor countries have mainly or almost only themselves to blame for the problems they face today. No matter from the government to the individual, they have the ability to overcome the challenges they encounter and change their fate. Just as how Liz Murray overcame all the extreme harsh in life and move out of poverty to become a student in Harvard university in the movie titles “Homeless to Harvard”. If she can do it, everyone and every country can do it.