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What the Poor Say
Insecure Livelihood
Everyday there are more unemployed, every day one sees more men around the
neighborhood. Argentina.
We go for additional manual work because the income from our cultivation and animal
husbandry is not sufficient. Sri Lanka.
Young healthy guys are wandering around doing nothing all winter because they only
have seasonal work. Kyrgyz Republic.
There is great insecurity now. You can’t make any plans. For all I know, tomorrow
I might be told that we’ll be laid off for a couple of months or that the factory is
to shut down. We work three days a week even now, and you’re in for a surprise every
day. Bulgaria.
She is worried about the future of her children and the struggles they have to face
when they grow up. Her immediate concern is to which house she should go for a loan of
some food grains for their food that day. An interview with a poor woman, India.
The poor typically have few assets to make a living. Livelihood strategies are
precarious and include a patchwork of low paying, dangerous, often backbreaking work for
low returns. All over the world, even where poverty has decreased, such as in Vietnam and
in Sri Lanka, the poor said that insecurity had increased. Excepting a few communities in
Sri Lanka, India and the Kyrgyz Republic, the poor also said that economic opportunities
had decreased. Most blamed governments for mismanaging the economy and for high taxes,
inflation and privatization; declining agricultural productivity and declines in
affordability of agricultural inputs; lack of cheap credit; corrupt government services;
or simply lack of government care for the poor.
Livelihood strategies for the poor are primarily in the informal sector, and are
sometimes illegal. People survive through an enormously wide range of activities —
small-time vending, doing odd jobs, carrying brick and sand, working in quarries and
mines, "shuttling" (the name given to constant movement while trading in Eastern
Europe), borrowing from neighbors and moneylenders, working two or three jobs, growing
vegetables on little plots, returning to subsistence agriculture in countries such as
Bulgaria, Russia and the Kyrgyz Republic, collecting grass, herbs, and bamboo shoots,
catching wild animals, selling cooked food, making crafts, working in factories, begging,
washing blankets and carpets, putting children to work, praying for rain, selling assets
one by one, surrendering to prayer, reducing the number of meals, changing their diet,
selling their own blood, and in desperation engaging in criminal activities, including
prostitution.
Everywhere, poor people equated poverty and insecurity with lack of assets, which
results in their lacking the ability to cope with income fluctuations and shocks. Lack of
access to credit from formal lenders was cited with astonishing frequency. In Vietnam the
poor said they either did not qualify for loans or were turned down: "while the rich
get loans, the poor get consideration of loans." In the absence of usable formal
credit, people turn to friends and moneylenders. Moneylenders appeared frequently on the
list of most important institutions in people’s lives, despite the fact that they
charge high interest and insist on repayment. In Ethiopia, young men considered the
moneylender their only hope for starting a business. In Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam,
Bangladesh, India, and Egypt, the poor turn to moneylenders who give loans for
consumption, who don’t have bothersome procedures and who allow payments to be made
in kind, including in labor. Many poor people said that they stayed away from microcredit
loans because of their collateral requirements, lengthy application processes and
difficult payment terms, including in many cases the need to start repayments immediately.
With few assets, stressed family networks, problems in agriculture, and dismal job
prospects, it is exceptionally difficult for the poor to be upwardly mobile. In the
communities where the Consultations took place, the researchers documented case
studies of individuals who had managed to become better off. A review of 147 of these
upwardly mobile people revealed that self-employment or entrepreneurship was their most
frequent path out of poverty. This was followed by income from wages and salaries,
benefits from family, and income from agriculture and access to land. Acquisition of
multiple assets helped people cope with the inevitable stresses and shocks of life.
Approximately one third of the upwardly mobile people managed income flows from all these
sources. Skills acquisition, learning to run a business, or learning particular skills
were mentioned in 27% of the case studies. Education was mentioned by only 15% of the
individuals interviewed with strong regional differences; between 20% and 30% in Latin
America and countries of the former Soviet Union; and between 4% and 7% in Africa and
Asia.
This relatively low contribution of education was echoed in poor people’s
generally ambivalent attitude about education. In most countries, the poor value education
as a potential route out of poverty. But sending a child to school can imply serious
costs, both in terms of school fees, clothes, supplies and in the form of income loss. In
several countries of the former Soviet Union the phenomenon of paying for education is new
and, when combined with economic hardship, is having bad effects on children’s school
attendance. Despite their belief in the potential value of education, the poor sometimes
question its quality, language of instruction and relevance to employment.
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What emerges from the collective voices of the poor in the Consultations is their
remarkable resilience, hard work and grit. A young widow in India was perhaps typical,
saying: "Even at times of acute crises, I held my nerves and did not give in to
circumstances. My god has always stood with me."
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