Poverty defined
Poverty can be seen as broad, multidimensional, partly subjective, variable over time, comprising capabilities as well as welfare, and in part relative to local norms, comparisons and expectations.
Poverty is about the inability to lead a decent - minimally acceptable - life, and while low income does make it difficult to lead a life of freedom and well-being, an exclusive concentration on seeing poverty as lowness of income misses out a great many important connections.
Rural Poor identified
There are two main rural clusters. First, rural people usually live in a farmstead or in groups of houses containing perhaps 5000-10 000 persons, disconnected by farm land, pasture, tree or shrubs. Second, most rural people spend most of their working time on farms
In practice, most poverty measurement focuses on private consumption below an objective poverty line that is both fixed over time and defined in terms of an absolute norm for a narrow aspect of welfare: for example, defining poverty as deprivation of sufficient consumption to afford enough calories, or as dollar poverty. Most studies settle for an over-simple poverty measure because it can be compared among persons, groups, places and times in a testable way. This is important in evaluating poverty-reducing policies.
This paper, too, follows this route, but also looks at the characteristics and descriptions of the poor themselves.
Knowing and understanding the poor is as important as understanding poverty. Three quarters of the world’s poor people, live in rural areas.
The poorest of the rural poor live in remote areas,
What access do the rural poor have to assets? In all regions, the rural poor lack the important asset of good quality land. Land size is often too small to ensure the nutritional well-being of the household. Indigenous groups in rural areas face particular problems in gaining access to land because the land so far is owned by a state as given by the law of the land. Access to other productive assets (modern houses) is also lower among the rural poor. This accessibility could lead to loan given by various banks in the country; they could be used as surety against sought loans.
Barriers to progress for the rural poor
Rural people are poorer partly because they are likelier to live in remote areas, to be unhealthy and illiterate, to have higher child/adult ratios, and to work in insecure and low-productivity occupations.
Land ownership is a key determinant of poverty: most of the rural poor are landless or small farmers. If at all, they have land the means of cultivation is so poor, they use hand hoe in tilling their land for consumer crops.
Increasing land pressure from population growth impedes rural farmers’ ability to expand production beyond the subsistence level in East and Southern Africa. If the poor own land, the farms are typically very small, dry land or in low fertility regions. They depend on unreliable rainfall; rather irrigation means to fill the gap of insufficient and unreliable rainfalls. Irrigation schemes calls for education given by extension officers of whom nowadays they not available in rural areas for assistance and minimum capital to finance the initiation of irrigation schemes.
Landless agricultural workers, and smallholders, are vulnerable to seasonal unemployment. In bad harvests, landless and near-landless hired workers are the first to become unemployed, before farm self-employment is cut. The landless are more likely than farmers, even small ones, to die in famines. The landless, they opt to be tenant to their landlords for their survival by seeking causal labour as the means of their survival in rural areas. The landless, however portion given by the landlords, occasionally they don’t have seek to sow in their small farm, they tempted to consume those few obtained seeds rather than waiting for them to germinate and then give staple food.
Poor soils, low rainfall and adverse climatic change
In most regions, poverty incidence is highest in marginal areas at risk from poor soils, low rainfall and adverse climatic change, though poverty is much less the cause than the consequence of environmental degradation. Soil erosion leads to a vicious circle of falling yields, increased exploitation, and further erosion. However, given the right conditions, such as access to capital, poor people have proved capable of improving their environments; intensified land use can be accompanied by environmental improvement rather than degradation
Indigenous populations face barriers to progress owing to both discrimination and their geographical location.
Barriers to progress often form a vicious circle.
Many remote rural populations lack social services, which in turn affects their productive ability. The social services include schools, health services and passable roads. As regards to this problem, the children fall into a pray of house servants in cities and towns and cities as they abscond from school attendance. The classical case is common in among others, Iringa rural, Singida and Dodoma.
Physical (remoteness) and social barriers to markets interact similarly. This similarly is true in areas of Kilolo district which is hilly district and the roads are not passable in most of the district especially in rainy seasons.
Remoteness and low population density result in inadequate infrastructure provision in rural. This affects not only productivity but also access to social services, making the rural poor more vulnerable to famine and disease, and prolonging sickness.
Poor access to health facilities, sanitation and immunization impairs the productivity, income and nutritional status of the poor in all regions, in turn making them less able to escape poverty or seek out health care.
Poverty increases exposure to short-term migration and hence Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, which in parts of Tanzania has terribly impaired the working capacity of the poor.
Lack of education for poor rural women keeps fertility high in Tanzania, and large family size impedes female education and the escape from poverty. However, there is an effort to reduce this gap for rural women through the MKUKUTA window but much dedicated efforts to emancipate the women, something has to be done.
Environment and poverty: How far a given income will go will depend also on environmental conditions, including climatic circumstances, such as temperature ranges, or rainfall and flooding. The environmental conditions need not be unalterable - they could be improved with communal efforts, or worsened by pollution or depletion. But an individual may have to take much of the environmental conditions as "given" in converting incomes and personal resources into functionings and quality of life. The environmental destruction and poverty are one in a coin of two sides, the poor turn environment opportunities into their survival by traditional farming through shifting cultivation, cutting trees and burning them, to till the land for subsistence crops and large scale grazing of cattle.The environmental issue is, thus, an integral part of poverty removal, and there is no way of delinking the search for sustainable development from the perspective of poverty removal. Kofi Annan, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, had this to say; "The impact of climate change will fall disproportionately on the world's poorest countries, here in Africa." Call attention to, "Poor people already live on the front line of pollution, disaster and the degradation of resources and land." "For them adaptation is a matter of sheer survival." This focus on the poor brings us solidly into one of the most important connections - that between poverty and the environment - which deserve much greater attention right now. It is important to see why and how the perspective of poverty has to be central to environmental and ecological thinking, and on the other side, why environment and ecology are integral problems of policy against poverty.
Rural areas are more at risk from large falls in employment induced by climate; from droughts and floods; from illness and high mortality; and often from war, cattle raiding (Mara, Arusha) or civil disturbance (farmers against pastoralists).
The poor are especially vulnerable to most such risks.
Poor people, especially in rural areas, are particularly likely to be vulnerable to the consequences of two patterns of events. The first involves a high rate of child deaths, linked to many and closely spaced births, and large, chronically poor families.
The second pattern involves sharp income reductions in bad times, inability to build up or keep assets (including skills), reliance on unskilled and often casual labour for income, residence in unreliably watered rural areas and transient but frequent and severe poverty. The current rapid transition from higher to lower fertility is transforming both these patterns of events.
Consequences of Poverty
Poverty can certainly make a person outraged and desperate, and a sense of injustice can be a good ground for rebellion - even bloody rebellion.
There has, in fact, been an increasing tendency in recent years to argue in favour of policies of poverty removal on the ground that this is the surest way to prevent political strife and turmoil. Since generic physical violence seems to be more widely loathed and feared, especially by well-placed people, than social inequity and the deprivation - even extreme deprivation - of others, it is indeed tempting to be able to tell all, including the rich and those well-placed in society, that terrible poverty will generate terrifying violence, threatening the lives of all. Given the visibility and public anxiety about wars and disorders, the indirect justification of poverty removal - not for its own sake but for pursuing peace and quiet - has become, in recent years, a dominant part of the rhetoric of fighting poverty (MKUKUTA strategy). Given the co-existence of violence and poverty, it is not at all unnatural to ask whether poverty kills twice - first through economic privation, and second through political and social carnage are anticipated.
Poverty and environment are one coin of two sides.
