Endemic Poverty Research Articles

The Impact of Cost Sharing and Parental Participation on Secondary School Performance in Botswana

The Botswana government discontinued school fees in the 1980s as an attempt to address the endemic poverty and gravely unequal distribution of wealth in the country. The country invested vast amounts in education in an attempt to achieve impressive gains in educational access at all levels. However, the dawn of the new millennium brought with it the re-introduction of school fees. This was termed cost recovery, but many authors across the world blame the move for eroding the gains achieved during the era of free education in a number of countries. This study seeks to investigate the changes that the exercise could have brought about in the areas of parental participation and schools' academic results. The researchers used a case study method for the qualitative research. Observations, documentary study and interviews were used to collect data. Both purposeful and random techniques were used to select respondents. The results of the study revealed that paying secondary school fees cannot be used to enhance parental participation and schools' academic results. However, it was proven that there is positive correlation between parental participation and the quality of school results.

Examining the Fiscal Policy-Poverty Reduction Nexus in Nigeria

Using a multiple regression analysis in the autoregressive distributed lag framework with ECM we include three major components of fiscal policy variables (Government capital expenditure, Government recurrent expenditure and Government Budget Deficit) as regressors and the rate of poverty in Nigeria as the dependent variable, this study explored the potency of fiscal policy in Nigeria in addressing the seemingly endemic poverty scourge from 1980-2011. Findings indicate that the level of government capital expenditures in Nigeria does not reduce the level of poverty in the country over the period of time covered by the study. Although the ECM result, which shows the speed of adjustment of the model from the short run to the long run equilibrium, is on the average, yet the economy did not show any sign of much potency in using the selected fiscal policy variables to tackle the menace of poverty in Nigeria. The study recommends that government should intensify action in implementing effective fiscal policies to ameliorate the level of poverty conditions in Nigeria.

Vulnerabilidad y periferia en las Indias: Cumaná y su pobreza endémica entre los siglos XVII y XVIII

Luego de los desastrosos primeros intentos fundacionales de Cumaná, se levantó una ciudad de vecinos empobrecidos y deficitarios, cuya condición no pudo transformarse durante todo el orden colonial. Las calamidades padecidas a través de su existencia se corresponden con sus condiciones de vulnerabilidad, históricamente producidas por la ausencia de riquezas minerales y por su situación de periferia dentro de las Indias. Este trabajo se aproxima a esas circunstancias, explorando casos y problemas que dan cuenta de una pobreza endémica en la ciudad y en toda la región, jamás resuelta en aquel proceso histórico.

Five Dangerous Myths about Pakistan

Though unable to resolve problems of endemic poverty, rampant ethno-religious violence, and crumbling infrastructure, Pakistan has pursued a remarkably deft foreign policy. Ever since its emergence...

Can she make it? Transportation barriers to accessing maternal and child health care services in rural Ghana.

BackgroundThe Ghana Community based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) strategy targets to bring health services to the doorsteps of clients in a manner that improves maternal and child health outcomes. In this strategy, referral is an important component but it is threatened in a rural context where transportation service is a problem. Few studies have examined perceptions of rural dwellers on transportation challenges in accessing maternal health care services within CHPS.MethodsUsing the political ecology of health framework, this paper investigates transportation barriers in health access in a rural context based on perceived cause, coping mechanisms and strategies for a sustainable transportation system. Eight (8) focus group discussions involving males (n = 40) and females (n = 45) in rural communities in a CHPS zone in the Upper West Region of Ghana were conducted between September and December 2013.ResultsLack of vehicular transport is suppressing the potential positive impact of CHPS on maternal and child health. Consistent neglect of road infrastructural development and endemic poverty in the study area makes provision of alternative transport services for health care difficult. As a result, pregnant women use risky methods such as bicycle/tricycle/motorbikes to access obstetric health care services, and some turn to traditional medicines and traditional birth attendants for maternal health care services.ConclusionThese findings underscore the need for policy to address rural transport problems in order to improve maternal health. Community based transport strategy with CHPS is proposed to improve adherence to referral and access to emergency obstetric services.

Room for improvement: Hydroclimatic challenges to poverty-reducing development of the Brahmaputra River basin

Abstract The Brahmaputra river is the largest (by annual discharge) of the three in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) system, and by itself carries more flow than all but 4 rivers in the world. It is the primary water source for over 130 million people, many of whom are mired in chronic poverty. The potential in the Brahmaputra River basin for poverty-reducing development of agriculture and hydropower is great. However, progress in these sectors and others has been hindered by significant natural and anthropogenic challenges. As they attempt to develop their water resources in a manner that reduces water-related vulnerabilities, the people of the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, Bhutan, Northeast India, and Bangladesh face a number of challenges, including: endemic poverty; floods; droughts; groundwater over-abstraction; political unrest; and the broader development ambitions of the member nations (leading to net import or export of resources from the basin). To those challenges have recently been added climate change and difficult decisions regarding hydropower development. A critical compounding factor in the Brahmaputra basin is the lack of an authoritative, reliable, and comprehensive network of basin-wide information on climate, streamflow, natural hazards, and economic factors, such as agricultural production, prices, and trade. Anthropocentric development in the Brahmaputra basin must balance the goal of immediate poverty reduction with the preservation of the vulnerable, rich natural heritage of the basin, in the interest both of intergenerational human equity, and biocentric egalitarianism. In the space allotted here, we provide a snapshot of the demographic and hydroclimatic characteristics of the basin of greatest concern to water system planners aiming at poverty reduction through sustainable development. We propose that the basin's hydro-climatological, economic, and political complexities are such that a basin-wide water system knowledge platform is needed to organize quantitative thinking on potential water-related investments in the basin.

Coleridge, Employment and the Sorcery of Wealth

The Friend and the Lay Sermons present the problem of how the employment relationship should be located within the public/private divide that operates in Constitutional theory. This article is concerned with the question whether, in Coleridge’s thought, the low wages that caused the endemic poverty of the working poor engaged a role for the state, or whether the outcomes of contracting - the terms of the bargain between worker and employer - resided within an exclusively private realm with which the state should not, in principle, concern itself. If a role for the state was envisaged, how could that role be fulfilled? I shall argue that, whilst Coleridge’s Lay Sermons explicitly propounded three influences for moderating the disruptive potential of laissez-faire liberalism, there is elsewhere in Lay Sermons and The Friend the embryonic form of a fourth mechanism that he fails to locate within this typology of remedies. In this article I am principally concerned with the fourth possibility rather than the remedies that Coleridge explicitly prescribed. I shall not be concerned with Coleridge’s ideas on trade unionism, other than to note here that he did not argue for a regulatory regime that would tolerate collective industrial action. This was so because the coercive disciplinary powers necessary to enforce solidarity between workers was, in his view, incompatible with the moral freedom of the individual worker.

Political Culture, Leadership Crisis and Development Challenge in Nigeria: A Critical Analysis

The challenge of leadership and development in Nigeria and a number of countries in Africa over the past several decades of independence has been a matter of tremendous public concern to which a great deal of scholarly efforts had been devoted. The situation has led many potentially great countries like Nigeria to be counted among some of the worst places in the world because of endemic poverty, unemployment, diseases and insecurity that ravage a large segment of the population. Efforts at interpreting the social forces propelling the pervasive poor quality leadership and development problems afflicting most parts of Africa, with special reference to Nigeria, tend to emphasize factors like colonialism, ethnic diversities, military interventions and multicultural realities. This paper argues that the emergence of these factors as sources of sociopolitical destabilization and development quagmire in Nigeria represents the consequences of the underlying political culture that evolved in the course of the country’s political development. Thus, the paper is an attempt to situate the challenge of poor quality leadership and its associated development challenge in Nigeria within the context of the prevailing political culture which tends to promote particularistic tendencies. The paper adopted Parson’s social system theory vis-à-vis pattern variables to provide theoretical elucidation, and drew attention to certain categorical imperativesthat can inspire the evolution of transformational political culture with social responsibility, transparency, accountability, ethics, discipline, fairness and collective interest as its essential ingredients.

Power and control in the Imperial Valley: nature, agribusiness, and workers on the California borderland, 1900-1940

Benny J. Andres, Jr., Power and Control in the Imperial Valley: Nature, Agribusiness, and Workers on the California Borderland, 1900-1940. Reviewed by Nathan F. Sayre, University of California, Berkeley The Imperial Valley, straddling the United States-Mexico border from the mouth of the Colorado River north into California, must be considered one of the most extraordinary cases of agro-industrial transformation in the world. Benny Andres, Jr. has produced a remarkably detailed chronicle of this world historic transformation, based on a wealth of primary materials. He condenses the period from 1900 to 1940 into just 161 pages, followed by a short Afterword that considers this history from the perspective of the present, when “the Imperial Valley is infamous for its flagrant water waste, unsustainable farming practices, feeble economic output, endemic poverty, and debilitating pollution” (p. 163). “Imperial-Mexicali Valley’s history,” Andres argues, “is the quest for power, control, and profits” (p. 66), reflecting “a peculiar mental inclination” (p. 4) to dominate and exploit nature and people alike. He shows how an unholy alliance of capitalists, landowners and politicians, increasingly enabled by government policies and largesse at all levels, conquered one of the hottest and driest places in North America by means of irrigation, agricultural science, chemical pesticides, legal- bureaucratic chicanery and outright violence. Moving in broadly chronological fashion, Andres explores how the Colorado River was diverted to irrigate the valley (chapter 1); how soils, plants, insects and animals were forcibly manipulated and persecuted to produce ever more crops (chapter 2); how racist ideologies and tactics were mobilized and resisted in creating strict (if also dynamic) hierarchies of social domination (chapters 3 and 4); and how all of these transformations shaped four decades of brutal repression of farm labor organizers, activists and advocates (chapter 5). The strength of Power and Control in the Imperial Valley rests on the fine grain of its empirical materials, ranging from the engineering of groundwater drainage and salinity control to the cross-border micro-politics of the Mexican Revolution. Specific details enrich the narrative throughout, bringing an almost visceral quality to droughts, floods, farming practices, police and vigilante violence, perverted justice and contorted logic. Although the diversion of the Colorado River has received comparably detailed treatments before, to my knowledge no one has chronicled the region’s social history so richly until now. It is a daunting task to fit so much detail into such a short book, however. Within each chapter, events twist and turn so quickly, with so many causal and contingent factors invoked or alluded to, that basic facts sometimes become elusive. How much were farm wages over this period? Were they paid by the hour or the day? How often were they paid at all? More tables and maps would be helpful. Similarly, the chapters

Climate Change and Nutrition in Africa

Climate change is a threat to Africa, one of the most vulnerable regions to climate variability and change, due to its sensitive economies, multiple stresses, low resilience, endemic poverty, weak institutions, recurrent droughts, complex emergencies, and conflicts. Climate impacts African populations, economies, and the need for emergency resources. Climate change exacerbates undernutrition and undermines efforts to reduce poverty and the resilience of vulnerable populations, decreasing their ability to cope and adapt to negative consequences of climate change and inhibiting their economic growth, particularly in sub-Saharan countries. Recent drought-triggered famine in Somalia spurred food crises in other countries, demonstrating the consequences that may come with the increased frequency of extreme weather events. This article reviews the existing research on climate change and variability; its impacts on nutrition security in Africa, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa; and adaptation and mitigation strategies to address these challenges. This article identifies research needs in nutrition and related sectors to address the impacts that climate change will have on nutrition security in Africa and adaptation and mitigation strategies over the next 10–15 years.

Considering a Public Health Model for Control and Prevention of Emerging Infectious Diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa

Despite increasing global efforts to contain infectious diseases such as Ebola, HIV, and new strains of Hepatitis Virus, the spread and burden still constitute more than 25% of the global disease picture. In this report, insights on an innovative cost saving evolutionary learning laboratory model (ELS Lab) consisting of a systems approach to the control of infectious diseases are discussed. There have been many science-based analyses from demographic, epidemiologic, disease intervention, and economic control measures in Sub-Saharan Africa to curb infectious diseases, yet the continued spread of new and old infectious diseases poses a serious challenge to public health in SSA. There is persistent typhoid endermicity with emergence of new antibiotic resistant strains of salmonella typhi as well as non typhoidal salmonellosis. There is increasing resistant strains of Entameoba histolytica to metronidazle, poor response of patients to artemisinin based antimalarials and sporadic cholera is spreading. Although disease elimination programs such as against trypanosomiasis (chagas disease), onchocerciasis, lymphatic filariasis, leprosy, trachoma, and measles are succeeding such as drancontiasis elimination process is very successful in northern Nigeria and Cameroon, ebola virus disease, dengue, leishmaniasis, african trypanosomiasis, malaria, diarrheal diseases, helminthes infections, and tuberculosis are re-emerging due to inadequate interventions and control strategies couple with breakdown of health delivery systems. In most countries in SSA, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS is not less than 4% of the total population. The challenges caused by both new and old opportunistic infections in HIV/AIDS couple with increasing resistance to highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) calls for serious new intervention strategy. Endemic poverty and increasing changes in climatic pattern in the current control efforts especially with ebola virus are potentially playing a role in the persistence of these infections. We note that application of technologies must be culture driven, cost-effective with intensified research is essential if these and other scourges are to be controlled or eliminated in the 21st century. The process of ELS Lab involves all relevant stakeholders from rural and peri- urban setting, from end users of new medical technology innovations and indigenous management strategies to the developers of the technologies and policy awareness on the integration of safe and productive farm practices with less vulnerability to infections. We propose further capacity building and research into this model.

The justice of God in his anger: A narrative analysis of Isaiah 5:1-7 and its implications for socio-economic and security challenges in Nigeria

The passage of Isa 5 : 1-7 could be regarded as a dirge about the un-fruitfulness and wastefulness of God's resources by the people of Judah. The people were provided with every resource needed to blossom in their endeavours, they were given the enabling environment and favourable weather, but when the time of harvest came, instead of bringing forth good fruit and bountiful harvest, they brought forth wild grape. The output does not justify the input. The owner of the resources was angered by this situation and took up a complaint against the people and decided to punish them severely.This situation of Judah is not dissimilar with that of Nigeria, who is presently experiencing endemic poverty, insecurity, corruption and political instability in the midst of abundance of minerals, human and material resources. The aim of this article is to carry out a narrative analysis of Isa 5 : 1-7, looking at the complaint of Yahweh against the people of Judah and contextualize the results of the exegesis, with the aid of intercultural hermeneutics, to the Nigerian situation,whose current socio-economic and political experience is not different from that of Judah.

‘Criminally Poor?’

ABSTRACTHistorians of the eighteenth century have only partially theorized about the relationship between poverty and crime; in particular, few have attempted to measure its nature and extent in detail. Moreover, such scholarship has investigated the phenomenon in urban environments, rather than rural contexts. This article examines the incidence of theft in the eighteenth century and utilizes Oxfordshire as a prosperous rural area. By seeking to eliminate endemic poverty from such calculations, the article more accurately investigates whether a link between crime and poverty is evident. By blending qualitative and quantitative approaches, the article also provides a suggested methodology for further micro-histories of this kind across a range of socio-economic areas in Britain and beyond during the early industrial period.

Peace Education in Iran: Challenges and Prospects

This article examines peace education in Iran at the primary and secondary levels. It starts by briefly reviewing the fundamental issues that need to be addressed to achieve a culture of peace in any given society, such as cycles in social relations that may establish endemic poverty, violence, and discrimination. The paper highlights the measures necessary to supersede these cycles and social arrangements and examines the need for promotion of peace education and empowerment across all segments of society. Among such measures, peace education is considered essential because it serves the dual roles of advancing awareness and providing capacity and skill to initiate social change. The case of Iran and the challenges that hinder the development of peace education in Iran are then examined. These include a lack of critical and diverse perspectives, lack of understanding on the part of most teachers and peace trainers about the importance of peace and all its aspects, and the content of the Iranian curriculum. Finally, the paper addresses opportunities for peace education in Iran, especially given a new, more open political environment. Such opportunities include the role and impact of women, youth, civil society organisations, and new religious readings favourable to peace.

The Economic Impact of Productive Safety Net Program on Poverty: Evidence from Household Survey Data, Tigrai National Regional State, Ethiopia

This paper aims at evaluating the impact of productive safety net program on poverty using primary data from randomly selected 600 households in central zone of Tigrai National Regional State, Ethiopia. Propensity Score Matching and Foster-Greer-Thorbecke were used to evaluate impact of the program and poverty, respectively. The paper revealed that the program has positive and significant effect on consumption, livestock holdings, and productive assets. Moreover, impact of the program on total consumption expenditure per adult equivalent was found to be positive and significant. Using total poverty line, poverty rate was lowest among program participants (30.33%) than non-participants (31.1%). Highest poverty rate was found among households headed by women (38.42%) while households headed by men (23.1%). The study also revealed that the program has positive and significant effect on poverty reduction and protecting productive assets. Finally, it was recommended that female headed program participants based programs should be provided to help boost their agricultural output and reduce endemic poverty. Classification-JEL: C Keywords: asset; consumption per adult equivalent; productive safety net program; propensity score matching; poverty; Tigrai

RETHINKING ASIAN MOBILITIES

ABSTRACTVietnam's economic reforms have generated much praise for the country's rapid “opening” of its markets, as if the Vietnamese nation had previously existed in a state of isolation, closed to broader global influences and exchanges. Such discourses overlook the importance of transnational circulations of people, goods, technologies, and expertise during the socialist era that were vital to Vietnam's postwar national reconstruction and continue to play a role in post-socialist economic transformation today. This article traces the socialist pathways of labor migration between Vietnam and the former Soviet Bloc (specifically, East Germany) in the 1980s, mobilities that are generally absent in studies of contemporary export labor industries. Based on multi-sited ethnographic and archival research, the author follows Vietnamese workers first to the East German factories where they labored as “contract workers,” and then through their subsequent return and reintegration into Vietnamese society after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These mobilities bespeak of an alternative history and formation of diasporic communities that are little acknowledged or addressed in literature on labor migrations, and yet are important to understanding emerging forms of stratification today in Vietnam. Moreover, an analysis of early non-capitalist experiences with overseas labor regimes in the 1980s provides insights into contemporary Vietnamese governance practices that promote—rather uncritically, similar to other “emerging countries” —export labor as a nation-building strategy to reduce endemic poverty and develop a late socialist country.

Exploring Inclusive Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategies in the BRICS Economies: A Multi-Country Study Of Brazil, China and South Africa

The acronym BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. A grouping of some of the world's most dynamic economies, the BRICS countries have emerged as an economic block, which has shaped the direction of the global economy, particularly in the past decade. The positive trend has transformed the development profile of the BRICS countries, lifting millions out of the vicious cycle of poverty. Inclusive growth in China has spawned large-scale poverty reduction, with the head-count poverty ratio declining from 30.7 % or 250 million people in 1978 to 13.4% or 179.9 million in 2012. In the case of Brazil, which features one of the world's most severe inequality ratios, the nation has improved the rate of impoverishment amongst its population in the last decade, reinforced by sustained economic growth. While the nation's poverty ratio escalated from 17.4 % in 1990 to 22 % in 1998 and 31 % in 2005; it has reduced to 26 % in 2008 and 21.4% in 2013 (World factbook, 2013). South Africa presents a different scenario, with the obnoxious apartheid system excluding the majority Black population from the nation's wealth until its emergence as a multi-racial democracy. While the nation continues to struggle against endemic poverty, particularly amongst the Black population; strong economic performance in the last decade has led to poverty reduction. Therefore, the major objective of this paper is to elaborate the nexus of inclusive growth and poverty reduction in the BRICS countries, particularly in the last decade. The paper employs empirical data to analyze economic performance in the countries and finds that inclusive growth has contributed to poverty reduction. Brazil, China and South Africa were examined as case studies, revealing the positive effects of inclusive growth on poverty reduction. The paper also presents a policy framework underpinned by macroeconomic policies, characterized by economic diversification, export-driven industrialization, foreign direct investment, as well as mainstreaming poverty reduction strategies in development policy.

Endemic Poverty and the Challenges of Peace and Development in Africa

This study seeks to explore the nexus between the alarming rate of poverty and developmental retardation with the attendant implications for peace and security in various independent states of Africa. Using descriptive method of data collection, the study identifies that failure of successive governments in various countries on the continent to creatively address the problem of poverty through purpose-driven policy responses has invariably posed devastating threats to the search for durable peace, and hindered the quest for sustainable development on the continent. In corollary, Africa's slow pace of development accounts for the continued intensity of poverty, thereby impacting negatively on peace and security. Therefore, the study contends that efforts at ensuring stable peace, which is the bedrock of sustainable development, can only yield the desired fruition ifholistic approach is designed for addressing the menace of poverty afflicting the continent and its people. In the final analysis, the study offers recommendations towards ensuring peace and development with a view to preventing endemic poverty confronting the continent and its citizenry.

Poverty Reduction and Pattern of Chronic Childhood Under-Nutrition in India: How Far Does the Link Exist?

In spite of an established link between poverty and under-nutrition in India, fall in under-nutrition is sluggish with fall in poverty. This research paper aims to seek answer on the effect of poverty decline on child under-nutrition in India over a period of one and a half decades. After examining the extent of association between poverty reduction and reciprocal changes in child under-nutrition, the paper found that although there was a definite influence of poverty levels on child under-nutrition at the state-level, the strength of the impact was not very high. This possibly explains why improvements in nutritional status among children have failed to keep up pace with steady reduction in mass poverty across the states in the last couple of decades. The results also strongly reiterate the magnificent role of child’s healthcare utilization and higher public spending which can help to capitalize on the increase in economic capabilities at the household level, resulting from robust economic growth and alleviation of endemic poverty.

Bottom-up climate risk assessment of infrastructure investment in the Niger River Basin

The Niger River is the third largest river in the African continent. Nine riparian countries share its basin, which rank all among the world's thirty poorest. Existing challenges in West Africa, including endemic poverty, inadequate infrastructure and weak adaptive capacity to climate variability, make the region vulnerable to climate change. In this study, a risk-based methodology is introduced and demonstrated for the analysis of climate change impacts on planned infrastructure investments in water resources systems in the Upper and Middle Niger River Basin. The methodology focuses on identifying the vulnerability of the Basin's socio-economic system to climate change, and subsequently assessing the likelihood of climate risks by using climate information from a multi-run, multi-GCM ensemble of climate projections. System vulnerabilities are analyzed in terms of performance metrics of hydroelectricity production, navigation, dry and rainy season irrigated agriculture, flooding in the Inner Delta of the Niger and the sustenance of environmental flows. The study reveals low to moderate risks in terms of stakeholder-defined threshold levels for most metrics in the 21st Century. The highest risk levels were observed for environmental flow targets. The findings indicate that the range of projected changes in an ensemble of CMIP3 GCM projections imply