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Reports on macroeconomics show that poverty in Pakistan has
increased over the last decade. Governmental and non- Governmental
agencies, both within Pakistan and outside, acknowledge that poverty is a
multiplex issue, encompassing as it does economics, health, education,
social status, employment and access to opportunities. The task of
alleviating poverty is equally complex. People experience poverty both
in relative and absolute terms: they also move into and out of poverty at
various times and under various conditions. Gender also affects the
experience of poverty, with women facing numerous structural impediments
to improving their situation.
Poverty alleviation strategies and programmes aim at increasing people's access to
goods, services and opportunities; increasing people's ability to
withstand the socio-economic shocks entailed in job loss, crop failure and
illness, and expanding the horizon of opportunities for improving the quality
of life of the poor.
NRSP can point to the pooling of resources through social mobilization,
income generation, accumulated savings, asset creation, the establishment
of profitable enterprises, the creation of reliable and profitable links
to the market, capacity building for better access to employment, reduced
costs in health and the provision of educational services where they did
not exist previously, as its most significant contributions to poverty
alleviation.
Since NRSP believes in a participatory approach, we ask people to define
poverty in their own terms and to let NRSP know what they need in order to
reduce it. The participatory wealth ranking exercise begins with asking
the residents of the geographical area selected for programme: "what is
poverty" and "how do you, as local residents, understand the indicators of
economic status here in your community?" People usually define poverty in
relation to the factors that lead to increasing or reducing the economic
standards of local people. Productive landholding is one of the major
indicators that people consider for determining the economic status, but
it is not the only one. In some places, the availability of water is more
important than the size of landholdings. In other areas, people see living
conditions - the type of house, ownership of other assets such as
livestock, tube-wells and tractors - as the major indicators. For areas
with urban features, people identify economic status according to the type
of profession: for example, people belonging to low-status professions
(cobblers, barbers and carpenters, for example) are considered to be poor.
Labourers with irregular and uncertain incomes, including labourers with
seasonally-fluctuating incomes, are considered the poorest amongst income
earners. Those people unable to earn at all (the destitute, the aged, the
physically or developmentally handicapped) constitute a special case for
poverty identification and alleviation programmes.
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