• Defining poverty

Defining poverty

Certain African countries have experienced economic growth in recent years, yet people do not report that their poverty situation has improved. This brief asks to what extent is there a divergence between objective measures and subjective perceptions of poverty trends and what may explain this divergence?

Five complementary explanations are provided, they include:

• households may be influenced by increasing absolute or relative inequality
• vulnerability among households remains very high
• a lack of improvements in a wide range of non-monetary aspects of well-being, such as public health infrastructure
• limited cash resources available to households to meet a subset of their needs
• although the proportion of poor decreases over time, the number of poor often increases due to high population growth
  

Key policy recommendations include:

• invest in the quality of publicly provided services
• improve the availability of cash resources households
• address highly visible manifestations of poverty or vulnerability
  

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