Poverty Alleviation

Reports on macroeconomics show that poverty in Pakistan has increased over the last decade. Governmental and non- Governmental agencies, both within Pakistan and outside, acknowledge that poverty is a multiplex issue, encompassing as it does economics, health, education, social status, employment and access to opportunities. The task of alleviating poverty is equally complex. People experience poverty both in relative and absolute terms: they also move into and out of poverty at various times and under various conditions. Gender also affects the experience of poverty, with women facing numerous structural impediments to improving their situation.

Poverty alleviation strategies and programmes aim at:

• increasing people's access to goods, services and opportunities;

• increasing people's ability to withstand the socio-economic shocks entailed in job loss, crop failure and illness,

• and expanding the horizon of opportunities for improving the quality of life of the poor.

PIPHRO can point to the pooling of resources through social mobilization, income generation, accumulated savings, asset creation, the establishment of profitable enterprises, the creation of reliable and profitable links to the market, capacity building for better access to employment, reduced costs in health and the provision of educational services where they did not exist previously, as its most significant contributions to poverty alleviation.

Since PIPHRO believes in a participatory approach, we ask people to define poverty in their own terms and to let PIPHRO know what they need in order to reduce it. The participatory wealth ranking exercise begins with asking the residents of the geographical area selected for programme: "what is poverty" and "how do you, as local residents, understand the indicators of economic status here in your community?" People usually define poverty in relation to the factors that lead to increasing or reducing the economic standards of local people. Productive landholding is one of the major indicators that people consider for determining the economic status, but it is not the only one. In some places, the availability of water is more important than the size of landholdings. In other areas, people see living conditions - the type of house, ownership of other assets such as livestock, tube-wells and tractors - as the major indicators. For areas with urban features, people identify economic status according to the type of profession: for example, people belonging to low-status professions (cobblers, barbers and carpenters, for example) are considered to be poor. Labourers with irregular and uncertain incomes, including labourers with seasonally-fluctuating incomes, are considered the poorest amongst income earners. Those people unable to earn at all (the destitute, the aged, the physically or developmentally handicapped) constitute a special case for poverty identification and alleviation programmes.