To forskere har brugt 20 år på at analysere armoden i storbyerne og er nået frem til, at forkert beregning af fattigdommens omfang, træge politikere og bistandsydere betyder, at slumboerne næppe får det bedre – hver syvende jordbo lever i slum.
NAIROBI, 17 December 2012 (IRIN): Efforts to end urban poverty are failing because policymakers at aid agencies and in governments do not always understand it, asserts (forfægter) a new book by experts from the International Institute for Environment and Development.
Drawing on 20 years of research, “Urban Poverty in the Global South: Scale and Nature” documents how the scale and depth of urban poverty in Africa, and much of Asia and Latin America, is greatly underestimated due to “inappropriate” (uegnede) definitions and measurements.
“The use of inappropriate poverty definitions that understate and misrepresent urban poverty helps explain why so little attention has been given to urban poverty reduction by aid agencies and development banks,” say the book’s authors.
Redrawing poverty lines
One of every seven people on Earth lives in urban poverty; many of them reside in overcrowded informal settlements with inadequate water, sanitation, healthcare and social amenities (faciliteter).
But simplistic income-based and nutrition-based (ernærings-baserede) poverty lines – including the widely used one US dollar (5,50 DKR) per day poverty line – yield a poor understanding of this issue, according to authors Diana Mitlin and David Satterthwaite
“If we are to use a monetary (penge alene) measure for defining and measuring whose income or consumption is insufficient… this measure has to reflect the cost of food and of non-food needs,” Mitlin told IRIN.
The authors also criticize the emphasis on “income poverty”.
“A focus only on income poverty can mean that a low-income household with a secure home with good quality provision for water, sanitation and drainage and with their children at school and access to health care is considered just as poor as a low-income household with none of these,” they write in a book summary.
Dialogue needed
Læs videre på
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/97058/GLOBAL-Rethinking-urban-poverty
Her kan man også hente (downloade) forskernes rapport i sin helhed.
