The Afrobarometer has developed an experiential measure of lived poverty called the Lived Poverty Index (LPI). It measures how frequently people go without basic necessities during the course of a year. This is a portion of the central core of the concept of poverty not captured by existing objective or subjective measures. As an individual measure, the LPI is found to be valid and reliable. However, it exhibits only moderate external validity when compared with absolute measures of national wealth. Contrary to what appears to be the consensus among economists, GDP growth is accompanied by increases in lived poverty, and there is only a weak relationship between LPI and measures of human development or income poverty. At the same time, lived poverty is strongly related to country level measures of political freedom. This supports Sen's (1999) arguments about development as freedom and Halperin et al’s (2005) arguments about the “democracy advantage” in development. This paper concludes that this measure does well at measuring the experiential core of poverty, and capturing it in a way that other widely used international development indicators do not.
Poverty and health
This issue of Poverty in Focus reviews the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to date and asks what can be done to accelerate MDG progress in the years 2010–2015 and beyond. There have been numerous calls for a new development narrative/paradigm from developing countries, international civil society organisations and development agencies. The contributing authors believe this changing context will affect the debate on the MDGs, past and future, in ways that perhaps only now are starting to become clear. They also believe that impact of the current financial crisis is likely to continue to frame debates over the next five years, and will be critical in determining the economic and social environment. Economic uncertainty in donor countries is also leading to declining public support for aid budgets. They predict the coming period is likely to be much less certain as developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, face several interconnected crises to which climate change is central, and which will change the context for achieving the MDGs.
This issue of Poverty in Focus reviews the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to date and asks what can be done to accelerate MDG progress in the years 2010–2015 and beyond. There have been numerous calls for a new development narrative/paradigm from developing countries, international civil society organisations and development agencies. The contributing authors believe this changing context will affect the debate on the MDGs, past and future, in ways that perhaps only now are starting to become clear. They also believe that impact of the current financial crisis is likely to continue to frame debates over the next five years, and will be critical in determining the economic and social environment. Economic uncertainty in donor countries is also leading to declining public support for aid budgets. They predict the coming period is likely to be much less certain as developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, face several interconnected crises to which climate change is central, and which will change the context for achieving the MDGs.
The Millennium Villages Project (MVP), an initiative of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is an attempt at an integrated and bottom-up approach to getting African villages out of the poverty trap. It involves massive injections of capital targeted at, presently, a handful of villages, combining agricultural support with health, infrastructure and education interventions. Taking a critical stance, this paper finds that although these aims are admirable, significant questions remain with regard to scalability and long-term sustainability of the MVP.
The author raises that the covert violence, the risk, the uncertainty and the possibility of daily life in Kinshasa resides in the gap between official visions and unofficial reality. Using two cases in which water is being turned into land, Filip De Boeck reveals the need to envision a ‘near future' that hyphenates dream and reality; a plan predicated on incremental transformation rather than destructive, radical, exclusionary change.
The People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty unites with the farmers, agricultural workers, small-scale food producers, indigenous peoples and the peoples of the world in commemorating World Food Day 2016. To call attention to the hunger being experienced by the majority of the world’s population, the coalition has called it World Hunger Day with the theme “Fight Food Injustice and Repression!” This calls attention to repression of farmers and activists for food justice. In 2015, the Pesticides Action Network – Asia-Pacific claimed that almost six farmers, indigenous people and/or land activists were being killed every month in relation to land struggles and conflicts, and many cases remain unreported. In 2016 they argue that there has been intensifying repression of farmers, indigenous peoples, agricultural workers, and other small-scale food producers. People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty condemn this repression and point to the need to change the structural causes of widespread hunger and intensifying monopoly control over the world’s agriculture and food systems.
Started 10 years ago, South Africa’s shack dwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo has mounted a remarkable struggle – often at a terrible cost - to protect and promote the rights of impoverished people in the towns. This inspirational story shows what poor people can achieve when they organise themselves. The Abahlali baseMjondolo movement was formed in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in Clare Estate in Durban in 2005. It was formed to fight for, protect, promote and advance the interests and dignity of shack dwellers and other impoverished people in South Africa. At the time of the movement’s formation Kennedy Road was facing eviction. The conditions were very bad in the settlement due to the lack of infrastructure. At the time the government had a policy of ‘eradicating slums’ and promised that there would be no more ‘slums’ by 2014. However the process left some people homeless and others would be taken to tiny and badly made ‘houses’ far outside of the cities. So the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement successfully organised to stop the evictions and the ‘slum eradication’ program. They organised clean ups and brought ’Operation Khanyisa” (self-connection to electricity) which started in Soweto to Durban. Abahlali aims to build the power of the impoverished from below. However they write that they have faced serious repression in their struggle and that basic rights, like the right to protest, have been denied to them. They reject that others should speak for them and that municipalities should work with people in shack settlements to plan participatory upgrades so that the impoverished can live a dignified life.
Long-term and vigorously pursued redistributive strategies and policy frameworks are key to eradicating poverty and inequality in South Africa. In addition, sustainable poverty eradication programmes ought to be elaborated within a broader redistributive framework within which development activities would be located. This would also create space for winning back the support of civil society, according to a paper from the Southern African Regional Poverty Network that reviews the status of poverty and inequality in South Africa before exploring the contestation over how to lessen both.
This Background Note is an initial exploration of the political economy of adopting public works programmes (PWPs) to promote social protection and employment in low-income countries and fragile states. The author found that one main reason why some external funders (donors) and governments favour public works programmes over other forms of social protection is their anticipated economic and political benefits, such as household, local and national economic development, increased productivity and graduation out of poverty, and the promotion of political stability. This preference for PWPs is not entirely evidence-based, however, as current data on the impacts of PWP implementation are inadequate. The popularity of PWPs may be linked in part to political and organisational interests as well as concerns about programme outcomes, and political dynamics can lead to inflated expectations about impact if programme design and institutional capacity are not given adequate attention. The author recommends political economy analysis as a useful tool for better understanding these issues. It can contribute to the development and design of interventions that are more likely to deliver significant welfare and employment benefits, while also being politically acceptable.
Despite claims that Uganda’s recent success in poverty reduction has been significantly related to “getting the politics right,” there are concerns that the poorest may not have benefited from this form of poverty reduction or the types of politics that have helped shape it. Employing the analytical framework of political space reveals that although some of the poorest groups are represented within the political system, political discourse reveals a strong bias toward the “economically active,” leaving the poorest excluded from poverty programs. Significantly, there is an increasing divergence between the regime’s political project of “modernization” and the international poverty agenda, with important implications for the poorest.