[Comment] When the Poverty Line is Less Than a Dollar a Day

from All Africa

I usually stay away from columnists, but I thought this was a pretty good one. With all this talk of the poverty line moving up above a dollar. This article reminds us that many people are still well below the dollar mark. - Kale

By Dorene Namanya

One dollar; less than a loaf of bread, a kilo of sugar, less than 2 bars of soap, a kilo of ground nuts, less than a kilo of beans (the kind that do not have weevils), less than transport fare to and from the town to Kireka, Ntinda and Kajjansi, less than a litre of fuel.

One dollar; many people in Uganda survive on it daily, while many more people survive on less than half of it. And others, on nothing at all.

The government measures the poverty line at $1 a day per person. Charles Lwanga Ntale, the executive director of Development Research and Training, a firm that focuses mainly on poverty research, says that this is over simplifying poverty.

"There are many people that cannot even access that one dollar a day. People that we call the chronically poor." "Besides," he says, "What is one dollar a day when someone has to buy food, soap, water, medicine, pay rent and take children to school?"

According to www.digalist.com, Uganda is ranked as the 47th poorest country in the world just one place above Tanzania. Recent research by Chronic Poverty Research Centre shows that 31 per cent of the population is living in poverty (on dollar a day). Research carried out by Development Research and Training shows that out of those, 26 per cent are living in chronic poverty. But what is chronic poverty?

According to the Uganda Chronic Poverty Report published in 2005, chronic poverty is that kind where individuals, households or regions are trapped in severe and multi-dimensional poverty for a very long time.

It is the kind of poverty that stays with people for a very long time. A person is born in poverty, lives in poverty, produces offsprings in poverty and dies in poverty.

Mr Lwanga puts it candidly; you have nothing, you cannot get anything and there is no means of getting anything.

"But putting the poverty line at $1 a day is a gross understatement, because even at $2 a day, a person is still struggling to scrape by especially with increased cost of living," says Lwanga.

Research shows that people who live in chronic poverty are not reached by mainstream organisations, facilities and programmes like Universal Primary Education, prosperity for all (Bonna bagaggawale) and PMA (Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture).

This is because most if not all of these programmes target the economically active poor who already have some resources like land and skills and only need to be pushed to a certain level, leaving out those that are completely hopeless, in this case over 7 million people.

About 1.3 million children are not in school because they are unable to afford school fees, walk the distance to school, cannot afford uniforms, get lunch money and most are fending to find income to feed their families. "That is where you have children working in stone quarries, selling fruit by the roadside and some begging on the streets," says Lwanga.

Children constitute the largest part of the chronically poor making 59 per cent of people living in chronic poverty. Over 27 per cent of the chronically poor household heads are female rising to 40 per cent in urban areas and 16 per cent of those women are landless compared to only 10 per cent of the male headed households.

There is a certain vulnerability that is always attached to the chronically poor. You have orphaned children, jobless teenagers , the disabled and elderly with no source of income and women used as instruments of labour with low earnings and who have their property grabbed at the death of their husbands.

This group is vulnerable when it comes to calamities and shocks, like deaths especially the death of a breadwinner. HIV has contributed to this situation whereby parents have either fallen sick and cannot work anymore to support their families or have died and left orphans that go under the care of their elderly grandparents who they themselves haven't any form of income.

The way forward

The economic growth programmes that we are following as a country inherently introduce inequality in that you can actually see economic growth in the country but not necessarily among the people.

Free agriculture extension to the poor was dropped in favour of the market driven approach that marginalises the poor. Therefore, their needs would be the be re-examination of the economy growth model because the current one does not benefit all categories of people and excludes the chronically poor.

Uganda has over the last 10 years developed a poverty focused national strategy, the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) which recognises the need to address various issues. In the last five to six years, policy documents now recognise that chronic poverty is an issue that needs to be tackled as evidenced by some sector plans in the budget, legislation that supports efforts of the most vulnerable categories of the population.

For example, the equal opportunities Act that entitles everyone to adequate forms of livelihood, the disability Act that provides for the emancipation and protection of people with disabilities guaranteeing them right of access to services, employment, etc.

Even though all these policies are in place, they are not implemented. There is still marginalisation of people with disabilities, for example most of the UPE schools and indeed even private schools do not have access for people with disabilities.

They do not have trained teachers to help the disabled, no curriculum and lack facilities like toilets.Therefore according to Mr Lwanga, the government should stop seeing poverty as a residual issue. "Poverty has to be treated as a mainstream development issue," he says.