Opinion >>Bringing an extreme poverty focus into urban poverty programming


First published: 2010-07-23

Sue Phillips asks development professionals if they know who the poorest of the urban poor really are and whether a clearer understanding is necessary in order to implement new methods of empowerment which will finally break the poverty cycle.

I was recently fortunate enough to be asked to review an innovative urban poverty programme - the Urban Partnerships for Poverty Reduction Programme in Bangladesh. This US$120 million programme is funded by DFID and implemented by UNDP and the Government of Bangladesh. One of the most interesting aspects of the programme is its focus on the extreme poor. Whilst many urban poverty programmes have a focus on 'poor settlements', the focus of this programme is on 'poor people' and the extreme poor in particular. What does this mean and how does this programme differ from more mainstream urban poverty programmes?

Some of the answers are as follows: it means a focus on providing services to people living in some of the most vulnerable and at risk settlements, for example to households living along railway lines, on canal embankments, and on small pockets of available land; it means seeking out the poorest households in poor slum communities and understanding why they are considered to be the poorest and how they survive; it means making changes to normal project interventions so that they are more inclusive, and new initiatives such as education grants, linking households to existing welfare schemes, and 'temporary' measures to improve water and sanitation facilities on marginal land; it means a determined focus to encourage representation of the poorest households in community decision making structures.

But is this enough? Can mainstream urban programmes based on a slum improvement model be modified to be more inclusive, or do we need quite different approaches? Can urban professionals learn from the growing experience -largely rural- of tackling extreme poverty through social protection?

In my view, bringing an extreme poverty focus to urban poverty reduction programmes opens up a whole new way of conceptualizing urban interventions, and new approaches which potentially challenge the dominant urban poverty reduction model which is community based. Lessons from other extreme poverty programmes, for example from BRAC in Bangladesh itself, focus on individual households and supporting those households for a limited amount of time, through cash and asset transfers to break the cycle which keeps them in extreme poverty.

In Bangladesh, poverty reduction policies are grounded on the assumption that poverty is a rural phenomenon. Social protection measures are therefore focused on rural households and the urban poor consequently lack eligibility for such support. This is compounded by their 'illegal' status. This policy focus needs challenge and change. Measures to empower the 'urban poor' through supporting or developing community-based structures need to be challenged. Do they bring real benefits to the extreme poor, or do the rules of engagement either prevent or make it difficult for the poorest to access programme benefits? If the design of empowerment measures started from an understanding of why the poorest are unable to break out of extreme poverty and how they survive, would we see the emergence of quite different mechanisms for empowerment?

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