Ways to Respond to Poverty

Perspectives on Poverty

For most of us, income is the first thing we think of when we think about poverty. A lack of money, or less money than most others in our community, is one way of defining poverty. In Canada, the LICO (absolute) and the LIM (relative) are the two main income measures. We used those yardsticks in Understanding Your Context.

Perspectives Differ

But there are other ways of viewing poverty, and therefore how to attack it. These conceptual differences can be reflected in the organizations working on poverty at the local level. It's useful to have a handle on the range of perspectives that folks dedicated to poverty reduction may have.

One development expert, Roger Riddell, in a note titled "Approaches to Poverty- A Note from the 'Development' Perspective", written for the International Council on Human Rights Policy Researcher's meeting, summarizes the complexities this way:

"Poverty has been and remains today a contested area. There is unanimous agreement that it is a problem and that action is needed to address it. However, there is disagreement over what constitutes poverty, the unit of focus (individuals or families or households) and the importance to be given to different dimensions of poverty. There is disagreement about who should be involved in deciding what constitutes poverty. There is disagreement over how it should be understood temporally – whether at a particular point in time or over an extended period, and whether it should be understood as a permanent or temporary phenomenon. There is disagreement about the importance to be attached to the depth of poverty (the very poor, and the ‘not so poor'), to the vulnerability and risks of different groups to becoming poor, and to the gender dimensions of poverty.

Disagreement about what constitutes poverty is in turn closely linked to disagreement about its causes, and the weight to be given to these different causes. This, in turn, leads to disagreement about how best to address it. Finally, there is disagreement about the degree of ambitiousness about what to do about poverty. For some advocates and policymakers, the aim is merely to alleviate poverty; for others, the aim is to reduce the level, extent and degree of poverty; for others the aim is to strive for the complete elimination of poverty." (Roger Riddell)

You will likely see evidence of these philosophical differences among poverty advocates in your local community, and perhaps within your community foundation.

Here's a quick overview of five approaches to poverty, extracted from a much more in-depth review of these concepts by Roger Riddell.

Monetary approaches: assign a monetary value to poverty, using relative or absolute poverty lines and measures of income, or of consumption of a basket of "essential items". These approaches tend to focus on economic growth, or income redistribution
Capability approaches: focus on human freedoms and the ability to achieve basic capabilities such as health, nutrition, education. The UN's Human Poverty Index, for example, defines poverty as deprivation in three essentials: longevity, knowledge, and a decent standard of living; and it measures indicators like malnourishment, childhood mortality rates, and primary school attendance. These approaches tend to emphasize provision of public goods
Social exclusion approaches: define poverty as conditions where some individuals and groups do not participate in society and its benefits, and are marginalized. They explicitly focus on the dynamics and structures that exclude some members of society. They often result in anti-discrimination policies and other inclusion initiatives
Participatory approaches: involve people living in poverty in defining what poverty means to them. A multi-dimensional view that also aims to empower poor people as they participate in building solutions
Faith based approaches: most religious approaches combine aspects of the previous four. Often, there is an additional focus on inequality: attention not only on the poor, but also on the rich, and on the gap between them. Faith-based approaches also tend to stress the relationships between people that nourish individuals and societies, such as respect, trust, compassion, pursuit of truth etc.

Going deeper:

The above is based on Roger Riddell's 2004 note, "Approaches to Poverty – A Note from the ‘Development' Perspective", International Council on Human Rights Policy Researchers' Meeting, November 2004.

Here is a link to the website of the International Council on Human Rights Policy