Urban Poverty in the Global South

Scale and Nature

Diana Mitlin, David Satterthwaite

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136249150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

One in seven of the world's population live in poverty in urban areas, and the vast majority of these live in the Global South – mostly in overcrowded informal settlements with inadequate water, sanitation, health care and schools provision. This book explains how and why the scale and depth of urban poverty is so frequently under-estimated by governments and international agencies worldwide. The authors also consider whether economic growth does in fact reduce poverty, exploring the paradox of successful economies that show little evidence of decreasing poverty.

Many official figures on urban poverty, including those based on the US $1 per day poverty line, present a very misleading picture of urban poverty's scale. These common errors in definition and measurement by governments and international agencies lead to poor understanding of urban poverty and inadequate policy provision. This is compounded by the lack of voice and influence that low income groups have in these official spheres. This book explores many different aspects of urban poverty including the associated health burden, inadequate food intake, inadequate incomes, assets and livelihood security, poor living and working conditions and the absence of any rule of law.

Urban Poverty in the Global South: Scale and Nature fills the gap for a much needed systematic overview of the historical and contemporary state of urban poverty in the Global South. This comprehensive and detailed book is a unique resource for students and lecturers in development studies, urban development, development geography, social policy, urban planning and design, and poverty reduction.

1 Why this book?

Introduction

We believe that the scale and depth of urban poverty is ignored within most low- income nations, many middle-income nations and globally. We believe that this reflects a considerable misrepresentation and underestimation of urban poverty, and occurs because of the very narrow ways in which poverty is usually conceived, defined and measured. This also reflects a lack of interest from governments and international agencies in seeking to understand urban poverty and the many deprivations that it causes or contributes to. This book presents the evidence for these claims. A companion volume, to be published in early 2013, will focus on what has been learnt about the most effective means to reduce urban poverty.

This book also tries to make sense of why a large and growing evidence base on the multiple deprivations that are part of urban poverty has not helped change the ways that poverty is defined and measured. Part of the explanation is the extent to which the general literature on the definition and measurement of poverty does not draw on available evidence on urban poverty. But part of the explanation is the lack of attention given to urban poverty by development specialists. What began as our interest in why urban poverty was so often underestimated led us to more fundamental questions, including why urban issues are given so little attention.

Of course, poverty statistics are important for assessing the success (or not) of governments and of development assistance agencies (including aid agencies, development banks and international NGOs). The setting up of the Millennium Development Goals, with explicit targets for 2015 that have to be monitored in each nation, was meant to ensure more attention to poverty reduction. But as Chapter 2 shows, the main measure used for these goals (the dollar-a-day poverty line) is completely inappropriate for so many urban contexts. In addition, the direct measures of living conditions in the Millennium Development Goals are flawed. The indicators chosen for assessing provision for water and sanitation do not measure who has adequate provision or, for water, whether it is safe to drink (as discussed in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3). And the MDG target for ‘slum dwellers’ – a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers – is so much less ambitious than the other quantitative targets. While other quantitative targets are reductions by half (for hunger), two thirds (for under-five mortality rates) and three quarters (for maternal mortality), the quantitative target for significantly improving the lives of slum dwellers is the equivalent of 10 per cent of slum dwellers in 2000, with no allowance for the growth in numbers of slum dwellers after 2000. And the date for the achievement of this far less ambitious quantitative target is set for 2020, not 2015. This book assembles the evidence to support its claims about the inadequacy of the indicators used and their measurement. In most nations, the evidence base on the scale, nature and location of urban poverty is remarkably limited. Also explored are some of the reasons for the lack of ambition in addressing the needs of slum dwellers, the immensity of the task, the lack of vision and capacity, and the consequences for those who are (and have long been) marginalized by the experts and agencies of international development assistance.

The strong influence of the World Bank in poverty assessment needs to be recognized. The Bank has helped ensure more attention is given to poverty in development plans and discussions. Most poverty lines are set following methodologies recommended by the World Bank and these are at the centre of why urban poverty is underestimated and misrepresented. The World Bank is also the main source for poverty statistics based on the dollar-a-day poverty line – as Chapter 2 explains – which underestimate the scale of urban poverty and misrepresent the tracking of income poverty for the Millennium Development Goals. World Bank data are available for an enormous number of development- related indicators for nations over time, but few are available for rural and urban areas, and even fewer are available for each district or city. When there are urban statistics, most are averages for national urban populations that generalize about what are so often very diverse experiences.

The measurement of poverty is always based on the construction of national poverty lines with limited, little or no adjustment for local costs and realities. As Chapter 2 describes, there is far more adjustment to local costs when setting the allowance for daily expenses for ‘experts’ – as there is in the official rates set by the United Nations for these experts’ per diems when they work in low- or middle- income nations. Poverty lines are often not adjusted upwards for prosperous and high-cost cities, but allowances for much higher hotel costs certainly are made for foreign experts. This is part of a larger issue: so much official data gathering relies on nationally representative sample surveys that can provide no data about each locality. So the understanding of poverty and its causes is constructed mainly on national sample surveys that have too little detail on key aspects of deprivation and sample sizes too small to be useful in identifying the nature, and spatial and social distribution of poverty. Not surprisingly, these surveys completely miss the particular political economy of poverty creation (or occasionally poverty reduction) in each locality. So it means very little detail of where the health or poverty problems identified in these surveys are actually located. And the data provides no basis for planning and implementing local responses. To learn from some national sample survey (including the Demographic and Health Surveys¹) that some precise percentage of a national (or a nation’s urban) population is lacking provision for water or sanitation or health care, or has a high infant mortality rate does not serve needed policy responses, because it does not tell you where those facing these deprivations actually live. Somehow, the ‘data’ available to inform development has become lacking in information and detail about the local, in part to serve international agencies’ desire for national statistics that are comparable. As discussed in more detail in later chapters, this is true for statistics on poverty, on provision for water and sanitation, and on disasters and their impacts.

This lack of attention from the World Bank on understanding, measuring and acting on urban poverty is surprising because it was among the first of the international development assistance agencies to recognize the scale of deprivation in urban centres and to promote new approaches that sought to work with the inhabitants of slums or informal settlements² in upgrading their homes and neighbourhoods (Cohen 1983). The World Bank was also, in the 1970s, among the first international agencies to demand greater focus on ‘meeting basic needs’, which was in effect a recognition of the need to address the needs of those ‘living in poverty’. However, whatever the reason for the lack of attention since then, it has been replicated in many national processes – while these may establish poverty lines that are more precise than the ‘dollar a day’, they often fail to take into account the costs of living (or more specifically the costs of non-food needs) in urban areas.

This book and its companion volume (Satterthwaite and Mitlin 2013) also highlight the lack of any engagement by governments and international agencies with low-income groups (‘the poor’³) in the definition of poverty and the setting of poverty lines. It is so often external specialists who set the criteria by which poverty is defined and measured within low- and middle-income nations. One wonders whether they have ever consulted these urban dwellers on the deprivations they face. After 60 years of development assistance, there is still very little dialogue between low-income groups, and development assistance agencies and national governments. Those who are often termed ‘the poor’ are not consulted about the ways in which poverty is defined and measured. Nor are they consulted about their priorities, or about what they do to avoid deprivation. There is no understanding of the knowledge, capacity and resources they bring to coping with poverty – and could bring to reducing it. Our analysis of poverty is not undertaken as an abstract exercise but in the hope that it will support more effective action. Low-income individuals and households in the towns and cities of the Global South face a constant struggle to make something of their lives despite the acute hardship and disadvantage that they face. The companion volume to this will discuss how governments and some international development assistance agencies have sought to address urban poverty, the underlying concepts behind these interventions and the limitations in their approaches. It will also discuss how the transformation of our understanding of urban poverty and its underlying causes can point to far more effective ways of reducing it. It will describe and analyse the depth and complexity of social movement strategies aimed at challenging adversity and securing justice and inclusion.

It seems to us that most of those who define and set poverty lines do not have much understanding of the informal or illegal settlements in which such a high proportion of low-income urban dwellers live, or of the actual costs they face or of the prices paid for non-food needs (most of which are unlikely to be captured in international price comparisons). For instance, as Chapter 2 shows, there are very large differences in the prices paid for water per litre, with those with the worst access usually paying the most and often paying many times the price of water from the mains. How would this be treated in international price comparisons?

There seems to be an assumption in much of the discussion of poverty that it is really only food costs that count. So if the income of an individual or household is enough to afford food costs, they are not really poor. Extreme poverty lines, usually set at levels that allow for only enough to buy food, are still regarded as valid. But access to water, to toilets and to accommodation are also needed by everyone, and these are commodities that have to be purchased in most urban areas. There is also an assumption that if the proportion of income that a household spends on food is less than 70–80 per cent, it is not poor. But in many urban contexts, some non-food needs are so costly that they push down the proportion of income spent on food. A fall in the proportion of income spent on food may be taken as a sign of less poverty – but it may also be a sign of higher prices having to be paid for non-food needs (rent or water prices going up or new or increased payments required to keep children at school).

In many nations, there is little link between how poverty is defined and measured and actions by government and international agencies to address the deprivations faced by those classified as ‘poor’. Piachaud suggests the study of poverty is only justifiable ‘if it influences individual and social attitudes and actions’ and that this ‘must be borne in mind constantly if discussion on the definition of poverty is to avoid becoming an academic debate … a semantic and statistical squabble that is parasitic, voyeuristic and utterly unconstructive and which treats “the poor” as passive objects for attention’ (Piachaud 1987, page 161, quoted in Lister 2004; italics added). Most definitions of poverty and most measurements treat ‘the poor’ as passive objects. And many, by so underestimating and misrepresenting urban poverty, help ensure that the urban poor gain little attention.

Chapter 2 will challenge official poverty statistics that suggest that a very small proportion of the world’s urban population are poor. According to Ravallion, Chen and Sangraula (2007), using the dollar-a-day poverty line ($1.08 a day at 1993 purchasing power parity), in 2002, less than 1 per cent of the urban populations of China, the Middle East and North Africa, and East Europe and Central Asia were poor. In Latin America and the Caribbean, less than 10 per cent of the urban population was poor. For all low- and middle-income nations, 87 per cent of their urban populations were not poor. If these figures are correct, it represents a triumph for development. Deaton and Dupriez (2011) suggest that the dollar-a-day poverty line used by the World Bank is actually too high; they do not give separate figures for rural and urban populations but their figures suggest that in 2005 in the Middle East and North Africa, only 3 million out of 242 million people are poor (i.e. 1.2 per cent). For Latin America and the Caribbean, only 30 million out of 535 million are poor (i.e. 5.6 per cent).

But get the poverty definitions and hence measurements wrong, and it can provide the basis for so many inappropriate responses – including the conviction that almost all poverty is in rural areas. It can produce nonsense statistics about the extent to which the Millennium Development Goals are being met in many nations. It may underpin inaccurate assessments of the extent to which economic growth reduces poverty.

Although there are lots of statistics about poverty, there is actually very little data collected on low-income groups or those that live in informal settlements, the costs they face (especially for non-food needs) and their living conditions. For instance, in most nations, little or no attempt is made to assess the cost that urban dwellers face in meeting non-food needs – including the cost of renting accommodation, of keeping children at school, of transport, of medicines and health care, of paying for fuel, water and access to toilets …. The scale and nature of urban poverty is not well documented in many nations.

At the core of our criticism is the use of inappropriate frameworks, tools and methods for defining and measuring poverty. Most of the tools and methods used today in low- and middle-income nations are based on those developed in high- income nations many decades ago. As these were first applied, they were usually subject to professional and popular scrutiny, and this changed the ways that poverty was understood and measured. But these tools and methods (many of which are no longer applied in high-income nations) have been transferred without questioning many assumptions that underpinned their use which are not appropriate for low- and middle-income nations. For instance, when poverty lines came to be used in the UK, no provision was made to include the costs to individuals or households of health care and education because there was a national system in place that provided these at no cost. But education and health care are not free and not available to very large sections of the urban population in most low- and middle-income nations, where keeping children at school (or having to pay for private schools as they cannot get their children into government schools) and paying for health care and medicines often takes a significant proportion of total income (see Chapter 2). Or the lack of income means that children are not sent to or are withdrawn from school, and needed health-care treatments and medicines are not used.

Similarly, in the use of poverty lines in the UK the costs of housing were not factored in because accommodation for low-income households was addressed by another government department; the costs of housing in low- and middle-income nations are often not factored into poverty lines, or unrealistically low allowances for this are made, yet there is no other provision to support low-income groups in getting accommodation. In high-income nations, almost all urban dwellers, regardless of income, live in houses that meet official standards, with water piped in, toilets in each unit and regular services to collect solid waste. This is not the case for a high proportion of low-income urban dwellers elsewhere – and this often means high costs, as water has to be purchased from vendors or kiosks and access to toilets paid for.

The debates and discussions about better ways to define and measure poverty in high-income nations over the last three decades have had very little influence on how poverty is defined and measured in low-income and most middle-income nations. There is very little consideration of the limitations of setting absolute poverty lines. Indeed, the discussions around the setting of poverty lines in low- and middle-income nations today seem so anxious not to set these too high that they set them unrealistically low. There was actually more accuracy, detail and generosity in the definition and setting of poverty lines in the last years of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century in the UK than there is today in many nations. It is perhaps also worth noting that the first study that sought to establish the income needed to avoid poverty (and how this would vary for different family sizes and compositions) was for a particular city (York) and involved careful research into local conditions and prices (Rowntree 1902).

There are also very large differences in context and in data. For instance, how can there be a strong official information base about the quality of housing and quality and extent of basic service provision in urban areas if a third to two thirds of the urban population live in informal or illegal settlements, many of which have never been included in any official survey and lack any public provision for water, sanitation and drainage? And if they are included, this is almost universally only for the more official and longstanding of the informal settlements, leaving out those that are likely to have the worst conditions. How can assumptions be made about the value of government services within poverty lines when large sections of the low-income urban population cannot get their children into government schools and cannot access government health care or other entitlements? This book will make clear that the proportion of the urban population that ‘lives in poverty’ is often far higher than the proportion defined as poor by official poverty lines.

Some of the deficiencies in the definition and measurement of urban poverty have been addressed in the last 10 to 15 years. But there is little evidence of any real engagement with most aspects of urban poverty by those who define and measure poverty. For instance, it is common for the long and complex poverty assessments that are often undertaken in low- and middle-income nations (including poverty assessments and poverty reduction strategy papers⁴ ) not to mention ‘slums’, ‘squatter settlements’ or informal settlements, or to only mention them in passing without any considered analysis (see Chapter 2). This raises the issue of whether their inhabitants’ needs are actually covered by surveys. Since it is common for 30–60 per cent of the popu...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Urban Poverty in the Global South
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Why this book?
• 2 Measuring poverty
• 3 Why is health so poor among low-income urban dwellers?
• 4 Incomes and livelihoods
• 5 Critical issues in urban inequality
• 6 Broadening the understanding and measurement of urban poverty
• Notes
• References
• Index