60,000 people take part in 15-country study on poverty in Africa, Asia and Latin America
Even in desperately poor places, people retain initiative to survive and get ahead.
Markets, roads, responsive local governments among factors encouraging upward mobility
March 11, 2009—In 13 years, Oy went from living in a shack to owning a house and farming her own land in rural Thailand.
For years, Oy rose at 2 a.m. to sell other farmers’ vegetables and fruit at the local wholesale market. Saving bit by bit, she and her husband bought land, a pickup truck, a car, and a proper house for the family.
“All we had was perseverance and physical labor…From having nothing at all, we were able to have everything that we wanted.”
Oy was among 60,000 people in 15 countries interviewed for a new World Bank study that looks at how and why some people manage to escape poverty.
“Moving Out of Poverty: Success from the Bottom Up,” like its ground-breaking 2000 predecessor Voices of the Poor, paints a detailed picture of the constraints poor people face in trying to escape poverty.
Moving Out of Poverty finds that even in desperately poor or conflict-affected places, people retain initiative to survive and get ahead.
But the study of 500 communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America also concludes that people need opportunity, such as access to jobs and markets, to move out of poverty.
Crisis Driving 53 Million into Poverty
Many people fall into poverty because their assets and savings are lost or seriously depleted from a health shock, death in the family, or a decline in national or local economic prosperity.
“In the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, we need to understand the dynamics of poverty better by listening to what the poor themselves have to say,” says Danny Leipziger, World Bank vice president for Poverty Reduction and Economic Management.
“Their stories show us how it is possible to move out of poverty, especially when there are local opportunities available. But they also show how easy it is to become poor.”
Many People Fall Back Into Poverty
One of the study’s major findings is “there is no such fixed group as ‘the poor.’” Many people who move out of poverty fall back into it.
In the studied communities in the world, close to half the population is moving up or down the socioeconomic ladder, often with the same people rising and then falling at different times.
Typically, about three times as many people move up or down as the net number of people who move out of poverty.
Local Conditions Make a Difference
Even within countries with sustained high growth and falling poverty rates, some communities remained stubbornly poor while others emerged from poverty, the study finds.
Certain economic, social and political factors encourage upward mobility, including:
Overall economic prosperity (being able to find a job)
Presence of markets in a village
Proximity to cities and roads
Local government responsiveness
Conditions making it difficult to get ahead include a large proportion of poor people in a village, and deep social divisions in society that impede fair access to markets, facilities and services.
“Individual hard work and belief in self can take people far, but it cannot make up for lack of economic opportunity and blocked access to opportunity in the communities where poor people live,” says the study’s lead author Deepa Narayan.
Adolfo, 29, had to leave his small mountain community in Oaxaca, Mexico, to find a paying job. He endured hardships crossing the Mexico border to work in the United States. He saved enough money to open his own store in his home town of Guadalamoros but hopes he will not have to return to the United States to work.
“I pray to God that I will never have to return. Not for fear of work, but for fear of leaving the family and for fear of the risks you have to take to cross the border.”
Inner Strength and Confidence Called Key Factors
In contrast, Mamba, a 35-year-old farmer in Malawi, has no desire to leave his village despite droughts and periods of acute hunger. Despite all he has endured, he remains confident better times are ahead.
“I am an energetic man, and I believe that if I have fertilizer I can do better.”
In thousands of conversations with men and women in the study, inner strength and confidence emerged time and again as a key factor in moving out of poverty.
“Moreover, self-confidence increases quickly as poor people experience some success. In fact, poor people soon start looking very similar to the rich in their sense of confidence and strength,” says Narayan.
“We find little evidence that poor people are poor because of laziness or disinterest in work and savings.”
On the contrary, people in each country emphasized the “importance of hard work and of a healthy body to do hard work.”
Overall, some 78 percent of households in the study believe their children will be better off in years to come. That figure rises to 90 percent of households in Bangladesh, Senegal, Afghanistan and Andhra Pradesh, India.
Advice: Transform Markets and Focus on Local Communities
The study says development interventions should be carried out in ways that “respect and increase—rather than detract from—people’s confidence in themselves and their families.”
Solutions should focus on local communities and seek to transform markets “so that poor people can access and participate in them fully.”
Keys steps include:
Scaling up and linking poor people’s livelihood activities to markets
Providing connectedness through roads, telephones, electricity and irrigation
Easing access to loans that can be used for production
Providing information, business know-how, and skills to connect to mainstream markets
In addition, “social protection programs should be generous enough to enable poor people to survive shocks and build assets to lift them out of poverty.”
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