Panos London : Comment : Living with poverty, coping with shame

The international community has committed itself to halving the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015 via the Millennium Development Goals, and it will measure progress using a series of specific targets. Less easily measured is the relentless stress and tension of fighting for survival daily. This is something the Living with Poverty project set out to capture by means of frank and moving interviews. "Poverty means…living without any inner peace," says Palmira, a Mozambican woman in her 60s, who reminds her interviewer: "This poverty I am talking about – I am living it."

The men and women in Kenya, Mozambique , Zambia and Pakistan contributing to this project, often speak of common problems: the lack of work, the expense of education, the crippling cost of healthcare and loans, and inadequate infrastructure. Other challenges are particular to their location. In Manchar Lake, Pakistan, for example, the environmental pollution creates an extra burden, so too does the collapse of farming in Choma, Zambia. Some perspectives are deeply individual, yet shed light on wider themes.

A powerful, common thread is the stress of being poor. Edward, from Zambia, describes lying awake every night, "staring at the darkness trying to figure a way out of your predicament." Frustration is another constant emotion, with many significant examples of people encountering oppression, corruption or simple indifference. Martha in Kenya has been worn down by corrupt and time-wasting officials in charge of awarding the education bursaries which are supposed to be available for her children. She finally gave up: "You are taken round in circles until you decide to stop asking," she said.

These personal stories highlight the psychological dimensions of poverty, with some of the most powerful passages describing the shame the narrators feel at how they have to live. The reality, points out Mercy, in Kenya, is that she has had no opportunity to work or to gain skills, so she relies on paid sexual liaisons to feed her children. In her squatter settlement of more than 10,000 people, there is no latrine, a stark figure which translates into the daily humiliation of dealing with one's waste as well as that of other people. Joseph, who leads a community effort to clean up the slum is demoralised by the lack of official support, "I think the rich completely despise us," he says.

For many, poverty goes hand in hand with powerlessness. "Nobody pays any attention to us," says Nazeer in the Pakistan testimonies. He is one of several men and women who explain how poor communities are exploited by employers and traders, and are treated little better by the local politicians and officials supposed to represent their interests.

The accounts reinforce the importance of non-economic factors, such as informal social alliances and family networks, to poor people's survival. Often narrators identified the poorest of the poor as being those in their communities without family connections, and so lacking the practical and moral support this can provide. In Mozambique, years of civil war and migration to South Africa for work has eroded family cohesion, with many narrators citing the absence of parents, spouses or adult children as being a major factor in their inability to improve their living conditions. Maria, a mother of five whose husband left them to set up a new family in South Africa, says she has "no one to share her problems with and find ways of overcoming them".

These life stories show how hard it can be for the poor to take risks. Grace in Zambia says she did not dare invest even one chicken in a poultry project without being sure of a return. What at first glance appears to be a rather fatalistic approach is in fact a careful calculation of risks and benefits. Her survival strategy is so finely tuned that the slightest setback can have major repercussions. This perpetual insecurity makes it extremely hard to take up any economic opportunity which involves taking a risk or too much time.

This precariousness is vividly illustrated in stories where one event, such as illness or drought, proves pivotal in the trajectory of impoverishment, locking a family into debt, for example. Sometimes the tipping point is more individual; sometimes it can be positive. The two narrators in the Pakistan collection who managed to break the cycle of poverty did so in response to traumatic personal experience; pure economics was not the prime motivation. Salma, for example, was reacting to a bad marriage which left her determined never to be economically dependent again.

Similarly Lemaron in Kenya, disabled by polio, was unable to farm in the fields and so defied convention to become a hairdresser. He was spurred on to show he could succeed as well as any able-bodied person: "my greatest enemy is not my disability but poverty." But he acknowledges the "enemy" is pitiless: "…people here have lost hope [and] have written themselves off," he says.

Perhaps one of most striking impressions left by these interviews is the corrosive nature of chronic poverty. Many of these men and women describe how joblessness has eaten away at their self-esteem and undermined their children’s values. Mary, from Kenya, feels that if they had education and jobs, they would have much more chance of becoming "a good person". With this one comment, she illustrates the way poverty can distort people’s perceptions of themselves, and it highlights one of its most unacceptable human costs. This is the kind of insight that should speak to those working on poverty issues, and motivate them to push for stronger links between poor people’s priorities and the policies made in their name.

User Comments

This introduction to the collection of interviews is a powerful encouragement to dip into the interviews themselves as it draws attention to the so-often-hidden personal and private face of poverty. This whole rich archive is hugely important right now, as those of us in the industrialised world pull in our horns in response to the uncertainties of a global financial system in meltdown, and may even be tempted to cut back on philanthropy. That should be the last thing on which we economise, and we need to be reminded of what real, chronic insecurity feels like.

Posted by Sue Armstrong @ 4:36 pm on 30 October 2008

Congratulations on compiling such a fascinating and useful database of oral testaments. These provide incredible insights into every aspect of development and poverty and marshalling them by both geography and type of experience makes this resource infinitely useful.

Although subconsciously I have always been deeply influenced by oral histories – certainly it is the pain, courage, humour and passion of people who I have met that has inspired my journey in my development career to date – it was not until the mid 80s that I realized the power of this discipline.

I had written a book for Oxfam (with whom I worked and started their policy work). I believe it was the first book about the debt crisis affecting Africa and other poor countries. It was certainly the first in the UK. My colleagues told me, bluntly, that they thought it might be too dry for our audience; that I needed to spice it up. I did this by starting the book telling the story of a woman I had spent time with in Zambia, and who had been doubly hit by the debt crisis – which sent prices spiraling to the point her family went hungry, and the structural adjustment program her government adopted to stem the haemorrhaging of foreign exchange – which led to her losing her job.

I admit to being rather piqued that at all my speaking engagements after the book was published, the only thing anyone in the audience seemed to have remembered reading was the story of Florence Tembo. “What about all the substance?!” I thought; all my statistical analysis of which I was so proud, and the history of political and economic events leading up to the crisis? I now realize I was wrong. Florence’s story was the substance. The analysis was needed to both to show that her experience was typical, not an exception, and to demonstrate that change was possible. But the reason why action was urgent, and why the global community should welcome and finance action to stem the crisis was the human tragedy behind the cold statistics. It was this that prompted thousands of people to persuade an unwilling UK government to take the lead in the G7 countries in pressing for change. And this was the story of Florence.

“Living with Poverty” includes hundreds of accounts like Florence’s and all of them bring life and colour to technical issues. Certainly – for anything I will write in the future – I am going to start by scanning this archive for an illustration of the issues I am focusing on. A life story tells a thousand statistics!

John Clark, Lead Social Development Specialist of the World Bank (just retired), where I initiated the series of participatory poverty assessments and led the Bank’s engagement with civil society.

Posted by John Clark @ 11:55 am on 5 November 2008

I would like to congratulate PANOS for its excellent and pioneering use of oral testimonies to bring to life what it means to be poor and insecure in different parts of the world. I am a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies where I have worked for many years on issues related to poverty, gender and social exclusion. I have always been interested in trying to move beyond the restrictions imposed by certain kinds of academic research which prevent us from understanding what it means to suffer privations of various kinds from the perspectives of those who suffer them. The oral testimonies collected by PANOS not only provides us with vivid accounts of their experiences but also testifies to the resilience and resourcefulness that many poor women and men bring to their efforts to survive the present and plan for the future. This provides a tremendous resource for all those who would like to see poor people have more of a voice in analysing their own situation and devising solutions.

Posted by Naila Kabeer @ 1:57 pm on 11 January 2009

The human side of poverty is well illustrated by these stories, it being easy to imagine how seriously a small change can dominate the life of a struggling poverty-struck family. But this fine-scale view has the effect of not allowing us to better understand what poverty is from the overall cause or macroeconomic scale. To see this one needs to "step away" from the emotion, squlor and suffering and look more generally at the big-picture.

The basic cause of poverty is the lack of opportunity of landless families to earn a respectable living, without most of the value of their labour being taken as rent (or the equivalent in value of the product) by the land-owners. This dominant class of people are monopolizing the access to the land and by the social/political regime a situation exists where there is a polarization of the society into two groups, the idle rich land monopolists and the landless poverty-struck peasants and workers.

The solution of a direct redistribution of "land for the tiller" as was done some 40 years ago in Tiwan, can ease the burden of this social injustice and provide some relief, but even this answer has its limitations and the re-gathering of small sites into monopolized larger ones is still possible, whilst the earning land users find themselves having to pay income tax in order to help the government with its laws and military plans, without it necessarily providing for the development of the villages and communities (in such vital matters as communication and public health).

Surely, before any plan for poverty-relief, short or long-term is proposed, the proposers should properly understand the general macroeconomic ways that their community and the country as a whole should function. In the West this subject is badly understood and poverty is certainly felt too. So what chance is there for the poorly developed places to overcome their poverty problems?

In my opinion the long-term solution to poverty lies in a better understanding of how macroeconomics works and the strong influence of land ownership on national progress. This subject has been understood by only a very small number of economists and most of them are powerless to influence the governments of the poor nations and undeveloped places where today as in the past the land-owners are the controllers of the whole corrupt system that prevails. It is in their selfish interest that no progress will be made unless it is for their personal incomes to grow and the conditions of their working peasants to be kept minimalized.

A modern theory about how macroeconomics actually works must include land economics. Present theories deliberately have been fashioned to avoid this aspect. The writer of this comment has developed such a theory and is writing a book about it. As a retired engineer with a long-time research study on this subject, his logical and comprehensive approach to social systems allows him to see what is wrong with the poverty generating countries and what should be done to improve the situations there (details at chesterdh@hotmail.com).

To make land available to the whole population is no easy thing unless it can be arranged that the advantage in holding a greater amount than one can use is a disadvantage. The obvious solution (which incidently was proposed 130 years ago by Henry George in his seminal book "Progress and Poverty" of 1879) proposes that the land-values be taxed instead of personal incomes. Regardless of the state of development of the country involved, such a change to the situation should be introduced gradually but with the aim of causing the land-owners to give up their monopolistic control of the society.

Posted by David Chester @ 3:16 pm on 27 December 2009

Panos London

Illuminating Voices

Magazine

Media hub

Think tank

Life stories

Publications

How we work

Living with poverty, coping with shame

User Comments

POST A COMMENT

Free downloads

Related links

User comments

Support our work

Comment

Register for email alerts

Recent highlights:

From the magazine:

Our values:

Panos London