Insights on poverty

Deb Johnson

Development in Practice, 2002, vol. 12, issue 2, 127-137

Abstract: Many development agencies seek to work on behalf of the 'poor' and the 'poorest of the poor', often creating external definitions of poverty and of people living in poverty that are based on a complex list of things that the poor do not have. There are others who have spearheaded efforts to define poverty based on criteria derived from members of (largely) rural communities, many of whom would be considered poor. All such definitions ultimately result in some type of grouping of people into different categories of 'poor people'. By creating a list of characteristics of poverty, agencies believe that they are better able to target 'the poor' as beneficiaries of interventions to eradicate poverty. This article is intended to challenge development organisations (governmental and non-governmental) to look beyond simple definitions of poverty that are based on static characteristics. It is intended to provoke readers to re-evaluate some of their ideas about definitions of poverty, and to critically examine their agency's role in the business of poverty.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09614520220127658 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cdipxx:v:12:y:2002:i:2:p:127-137

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cdip20

DOI: 10.1080/09614520220127658

Access Statistics for this article

Development in Practice is currently edited by Emily Finlay

More articles in Development in Practice from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().