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Poverty Alleviation

What Is Poverty ?

What is Poverty – How is it Defined ?

Poverty has existed throughout human history and understanding the multi-dimensional nature is significant since it determines strategies and approaches towards poverty alleviation.

Poverty can be defined as :-

1. Lack of Basic Needs

• Food
• Shelter
• Clothing
• Health/Medical Care
• Education
• Basic Sanitation
   

2. Absence of Social, Political and Economic opportunities

Depending upon social circumstances and the availability of financial resources other needs – fuel, electricity, transportation, marriage allowance, repayment of debts, etc – may also be included. This fulfillment of needs should be provided to all citizens irrespective of colour, creed, race, gender or age.

Poverty leads to a vicious circle of low productivity, low income/capital/savings, which in turn leads to lower productivity and poverty again.

The objective of the shariah is to promote the welfare of the people, which lies in safe guarding their faith, life, intellect, prosperity and wealth.

Maslahah (benefit), is the property or power of a good/service that affects the basic elements and objectives of the life of human beings in this world, with the five fundamentals of existence in this world being described as :

• Life
• Property (Wealth)
• Faith
• Reason
• Posterity
   

All goods or services that have the power to promote these five elements are said to have maslahah for human beings, and are therefore needs.

There is a three level band concept to synthesize definitions of poverty, they are :-

• Minimum Sustenance 
• Minimum Adequacy 
• Minimum Comfort

Distributive justice is one of the most important components of the Islamic vision of a just socio-economic order.

To know what helps to reduce poverty, what works and what does not, what changes over time, poverty has to be defined, measured, and studied - and even experienced. As poverty has many dimensions, it has to be looked at through a variety of indicators - levels of income and consumption, social indicators, and indicators of vulnerability to risks and of socio/political access.

Measuring Poverty

Income or consumption levels

A person is considered poor if his or her consumption or income level falls below some minimum level necessary to meet basic needs. This minimum level is usually called the "poverty line".

What is necessary to satisfy basic needs varies across time and societies.

Therefore, poverty lines vary in time and place, and each country uses lines which are appropriate to its level of development, societal norms and values.

When estimating poverty worldwide, the same reference poverty line has to be used, and expressed in a common unit across countries. Therefore, for the purpose of global aggregation and comparison, the World Bank uses reference lines set at $1 and $2 per day.

It has been estimated that in 2001:

• 1.1 billion people had consumption levels below $1 a day and 
• 2.7 billion lived on less than $2 a day

Work on non-income dimensions of poverty includes assembling comparable and high-quality social indicators for education, health, access to services and infrastructure. It also includes developing new indicators to track other dimensions - for example risk, vulnerability, social exclusion, access to social capital - as well as ways to compare a multi-dimensional conception of poverty, when it may not make sense to aggregate the various dimensions into one index.

Work is needed to integrate data coming from sample surveys with information obtained through more participatory techniques, which usually offer rich insights into why programs work or do not.

Participatory Approaches illustrate

• the nature of risk and vulnerability 
• how cultural factors and ethnicity interact and affect poverty 
• how social exclusion sets limits to people’s participation in development 
• how barriers to such participation can be removed

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