Understanding Poverty

Dealing with centuries old practice of deep rooted feudal attitude, behavior and practices, and exclusionary power structures requires high transaction cost to alter rules of the game. Until and unless the victims of those circumstances have access and ownership of this process, their anticipation to acquire informed choices will remain as an illusion.

By Yamuna Ghale

Poverty is a complex phenomenon. Even till the date, defining, understanding and interpreting poverty has been remained as a domain of planners and service providers without meaningful participation and representation of poor in most of the cases. In Nepal, poverty reduction has been the core thrust of all periodic development plans since 50’s. However, the trend of poverty reduction remained sluggish and is still a major challenge. Economic deprivation has been considered as a dominant indicator of poverty for the long time. It has therefore limited the space for broader understanding of poverty. Tapping available economic opportunities also requires self-empowerment of citizen. Hence, to understand poverty, understanding an individual is utmost essential. Without understanding the social and psychological contexts of each citizen along with their economic deprivation, understanding of poverty will not be complete. Without empowering each citizen, it is difficult to expand their circle of concern and their influence from the household to a larger sphere. Therefore, empowering each citizen from within is a point of departure to fight against poverty. Thus, understanding of causes of economic deprivation, social and psychological context and potential of each citizen is important rather than keeping poverty reduction as a numerical target.

Poverty is a manifestation of unequal power relation. From the history, it is been very clear that the power relation is always a gender, class and caste based struggle. The disparity between the citizens according to their belongingness determines their identity, psychological empowerment, access to productive resources and presence in formal and informal decision making position. The defined and accustomed societal and economic hierarchy has thus largely shaped the development priorities and approaches. By the very reason, citizens at large are considered as a mere beneficiary of the project and or programme. Consequently, such dealing has directly and indirectly helped to create more dependency and establish patron-client relationship within development sphere. Social exclusion, discrimination and associated psychological barrier helped to uphold self-exclusion especially for women, dalits, ethnic minorities, people with disability and people from geographically excluded areas. It has not only played crucial role in hindering the empowerment process, but also further supported to strengthen the continuation of class, caste and gender based hierarchical relationship. By this reason, a person with economic deprivation and social exclusion has been systematically excluded from the process of participation and representation. They are bound to remain silent over their concerns and feelings. The culture of exclusion, discrimination and silence has been perpetuated at different levels and the discriminated citizens have experienced it differently. According to an expert on social inclusion, Dr. Lynn Bennett, incase of women, exclusion and discrimination begins at the family, Dalits face it at community level and Janajatis most of the time at the larger context of regional or national discourse. However, the process of exclusion does not only restrict oneself to be empowered but also hinders the process in larger social transformation process. Therefore, poverty is not only a symptom of economic inaccessibility but is largely a result of structural violence and deliberate disempowerment. Thus, poverty has to be analyzed from the perspectives of power structures and relations existed within household, within community and wider public domain.

It is increasingly realised that poverty is a state of non-acceptance, exclusion and discrimination. In most of the cases, even if a woman is economically capable and academically and socially competent, she still faces range of gender based discriminations, inequalities and violence. For example, at the workplace, her potentials can be underestimated, carrier development are hindered showing her unwillingness to take up challenging roles and responsibilities linking the professional potential with social obligations, and or her leadership might be challenged or denied. Same is the situation of dalits, janjatis, religious minorities or people with disability in a nutshell. It is therefore important to understand and capture actual daily life experiences and feelings of people on exclusion, discrimination, inaccessibility and non-acceptance. Likewise, providing physical services at the community does not necessarily ensure equitable access of all to it. If the people with whom to work is well identified based on economic, social, emotional and technical criteria and process is transparent and inclusive, it can empower citizen and enhance their potentials for economic and social transformation together. For example, building a hospital or school can only be effective if the concerned citizens are part of process and can have appropriate and equitable access to the services made available through it. Therefore, participation, representation and process based learning is crucial to encourage the discriminated and poor citizens to come out of economic vulnerability, social exclusion and sense of non-belongingness. Until and unless those people who are supposed to have access to the entitled services are emotionally and physically prepared to claim these services as their rights together with internalizing their responsibilities, development intervention will not address poverty as such. It is always important to have equitable access to resources, active participation and contribution in development process by the citizens in a transparent and inclusive manner. It can empower a citizen to come out of self-exclusion process. Therefore, psychological empowerment is even more crucial to challenge the patron-client relationship that existed in the society, which helps not to refrain from self-seclusion.

Furthermore, poverty is a relative term. A person with higher economic advantage and from socially non-discriminated group is recognized as an important person or master of the household or the community. However, a person with skill and rich life experience is seen as poor because of identity crisis, economic inaccessibility, denial of access to social services. Such people are not easily accepted by community and they are overlooked and not considered as a resource person to discuss about poverty. The poor and discriminated citizens are merely been part of formulation of development plans and their implementation and monitoring. The development programmes and projects often choose their own way of categorization of community and thus demands high transaction cost at the citizen’s level. Most importantly, inadequate and ineffective social competence at the policy and implementation level has further boost up exclusion process. The development plans and programmes are often missing the opportunities to reduce the social transaction costs and adopt effective and harmonized working approaches in a participatory and coordinated manner. Feeling and life experiences of citizen cannot be compensated by any other information and are highly useful to develop macro and micro scale development strategies. Giving an example, the advocacy on right to food can be effective if the experience of people who have suffered from hunger either due to inaccessibility on productive resources, or lack of available resources to afford for it or affected by natural disasters can be part of campaign with the support from the people with conviction on the matter at community and national level. It will thus give clear picture of interrelation of social deprivation, production, distribution and market chain, need of policy changes of adaptation and also importance of safety nets for those who cannot enjoy from other blanket programmes.

In conclusion, dealing with poverty requires conviction, fair understanding and consolidated effort for personal empowerment, change in societal attitude and public policy. It has to do more with proper understanding and seeking long-lasting options to empower each individual. Dealing with centuries old practice of deep rooted feudal attitude, behavior and practices, and exclusionary power structures requires high transaction cost to alter rules of the game. Until and unless the victims of those circumstances have access and ownership of this process, their anticipation to acquire informed choices will remain as an illusion. Each society is highly heterogeneous and stratified. Contribution in poverty reduction requires larger societal transformation. For this, a change is also required to alter the rule of game and establish values, norms and programmes that ensure equitable access and control over means of production, facilitate change in attitude and behavior of politicians, development planners and executers, and promote harmonized effort from all development actors. Further, advocacy and service provision should be an inbuilt component of each intervention, which requires social competence to deal with the context and thus help the citizen to access and enjoy the resources in an equitable and respected manner. Therefore, challenging the discriminatory epithet is important through solicited efforts to make poverty a history.

 Yamuna Ghale is a Senior Programme Officer, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC)-Nepal. She can reached at yamuna.ghale@sdc.net

(Editor’s Note: Nepalis, wherever they live, as well as friends of Nepal around the globe are requested to contribute their views/opinions/recollections etc. on issues concerning present day Nepal to the Guest Column of Nepalnews. Length of the article should not be more than 1,000 words and may be edited for the purpose of clarity and space. Relevant photos as well as photo of the author may also be sent along with the article. Please send your write-ups to editors@mos.com.np)

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