Poverty unperceived: traps, biases and agenda

Despite the fully acknowledged relevance of stakeholder participation in development research, an inaccurate perception of poverty and the lives of the poor is persistant. This is particularly true of the rural poor, to whom brief visits are occasionally made by organisations whose work is largely conceived of in urban headquarters. These partial insights into every day experiences of people living in poverty have amounted to a high degree of bias of perception of poverty.

This paper, aimed at development professionals, highlights some problems with perception bias and offers solutions to off-set these and establish better ways of learning.

Biases are reviewed in the following areas:

• spatial: choice of project/research location
• project: ownership contests between organisations and communities
• person: gender and age awareness and exclusion
• seasonal: timing of development work bring to light the question of whose convenience counts?
• diplomatic: success stories may be "shown off" when failures still exist
• professional: the vocabulary of development
• security: conflict and insecure situations may discourage or exclude visits
• urban: time and resource pressures may preclude visits further a field.

The author presents an agenda for action in avoiding perception bias of poverty. Practical steps are suggested which center around increasing the time spent in poor areas, widening the geographical scope of investigation and being fully aware of the biases of perception to an extent whereby efforts are made to counter such misleading assumptions.