Poverty in Polycrisis

We are living in a period of global volatility in which intersecting crises are combining with devastating impacts for people already living in and near poverty. This book carefully examines the dynamics of these crises and challenges us to find new ways forward for policies and programming that more effectively meet the needs of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

The book highlights lived experiences of those who are impacted most by poverty amidst intersecting crises—namely climate-related disasters, violent conflict and economic instability— drawing on the author’s 15 years of experience in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia. It examines chronic poverty amidst intersecting crises, highlighting how new impoverishment may emerge, and even surprisingly how some people manage to escape or remain out of poverty in these contexts. It offers a multi-scalar, dynamic investigation of poverty and intersecting crises to identify ways forward for policies and programming.

It is an essential read for practitioners working on poverty and inequality reduction in low- and middle-income countries, as well as for researchers and students of global development, environmental and peace studies, and economics, public policy, and sociology more broadly.

Written by Vidya Diwakar, IDS Research Fellow and CPAN Deputy Director

The Capability Approach and the Sustainable Development Goals: Inter/Multi/Trans Disciplinary Perspectives

This book demonstrates how the capability approach to human development can contribute to the realisation of the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The capability approach dictates that success should not be measured by economic indicators but by people leading meaningful, free, fulfilled, happy, or satisfied lives. Drawing from a range of disciplinary perspectives, this book argues that it is vital that the focus for the SDGs should shift to benefiting the most vulnerable. Case studies from across Asia, Africa, Latin America (Global South), and the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia (Global North) consider how the capability approach can contribute as a practical framework to achieving the SDGs’ ambitions for social, economic, political, and legal progress.

The chapter on "education and sustained poverty escapes in sub-Saharan Africa" authored by CPAN analyzes the interrelationship between education (SDG 4) and sustained poverty reduction (SDG 1). It draws attention to the role of education as an asset supporting resilience, as well as other factors that combine with education to contribute to capabilities that enable sustained escapes from poverty. To investigate this relationship, the chapter synthesizes mixed-methods research by CPAN in Tanzania, Rwanda, Niger, Malawi, Ethiopia, Uganda, and rural Kenya. 

The chapter argues that a combination of multi-level factors supporting education has the transformative potential to convert into sustained escapes from poverty. Indeed, people construct strategies for escaping poverty using education as an instrumental asset, yet few achieve sustained escapes. To promote sustained escapes, there is a need for more and better-quality education certainly, but also for multi-level conversion factors that can contribute to education and wider wellbeing outcomes. These are policies that can be consciously directed as well as people’s own adaptive strategies, alongside processes of social change. Examples of factors that support education include labor market links, livelihood diversification, social networks, spousal collaboration, shifts in cultural and gender norms to support girls’ education, and an enabling policy context. This combination involving multiple conversion factors alongside education is argued to be ‘transformative’ in paving the way for sustained poverty escapes. 

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Translating Growth into Poverty Reduction.Beyond the Numbers

Edited by Flora Kessy, Oswald Mashindano, Andrew Shepherd & Lucy Scott

Tanzania is a politically stable, much aided country that has consistently grown economically during the first decade of the millennium, while also improving its human development indicators. However, poverty has remained persistent, particularly within rural areas. This collaborative work delves into the reasons why this is so and what can be done to improve the record.
The book is the product of both Tanzanian and international poverty experts, based on largely qualitative research undertaken within Tanzania by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC). The authors highlight and discuss the importance of macro- and micro-level causes of the persistence of poverty.  The latter, on which the book is focused, centre around a negative dynamic affecting a large number of poor households in which widespread failure to provide household food security undermines gender relationships and reduces the possibility of saving and asset accumulation which is necessary for escaping poverty. This results in very low upward mobility. Vulnerability is widespread and resilience against shocks minimal, even for those who are not absolutely poor. Through an in-depth and broad analysis of poverty in Tanzania, the book provides alternative conclusions to those often repeated in the poverty discourse in international and local arenas.
The conclusions were reached with the specific aim of informing political and policy debates within Tanzania.

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