• Defining poverty

Defining poverty

This document is the second of a series addressing issues surrounding poverty and poverty reduction. It explains perceptions of poverty of the poor, well off and development practitioners to give a more complete picture of poverty.

The briefing emphasizes the need for poor people’s involvement in defining and exploring multiple dimensions of poverty. This points out the drawbacks of relying on understanding and interpretations of researchers and development practitioners.

Providing examples from previous studies in Tanzania, Ghana, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, the document admits that understanding of poverty varied greatly. Therefore the process of arriving at a shared understanding of poverty can be challenging but important.

The briefing concludes that:

• combining varied perceptions might be difficult but is necessary to improve the effectiveness of poverty reduction planning and processes
• insights found are useful to understand and prioritise some fundamental issues from the point of view of the poor
• participatory approaches can be used to highlight poor people’s perceptions of their own poverty
• poor people’s perceptions can be used to communicate their priorities into policy debates and decision-making
• the World Bank study ‘Voices of the Poor’ provides a model of how this challenge might be approached, by focusing directly on poor people’s perceptions. It helped identify the interlocking dimensions of powerlessness and ill-being which emerged from narratives of the poor
  

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