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The purpose of this paper is to explore links between a revisionist view of the “feminisation of poverty” in developing countries and women’s work and home-based enterprise in urban slums.

The paper’s discussion of the “feminisation of poverty” draws substantially from ethnographic field research conducted in The Gambia, The Philippines and Costa Rica. This research led the author to propose the notion of a “feminisation of responsibility and/or obligation”. The latter approach draws attention to issues such as gendered disparities of labour, time and resource inputs into household livelihoods, which are often most marked in male-headed units, and are not captured in conventional referents of the “feminisation of poverty”, which are rather narrowly confined to incomes and female household headship.

An integral element of the author’s critique is that the main policy response to classic “feminisation of poverty” thinking, to date, has been to “feminise” anti-poverty initiatives such as Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) and microfinance programmes.

The paper argues that the “feminisation of poverty” compounds the tensions women already face in terms of managing unpaid reproductive and/or “volunteer” work with their economic contributions to household livelihoods, and it is in the context of urban slums, where housing, service and infrastructure deficiencies pose considerable challenges to women’s dual burdens of productive and reproductive labour. The paper emphasizes that to more effectively address gender inequality while also alleviating poverty, policy interventions sensitive to women’s multiple, time-consuming responsibilities and obligations are paramount.

“Feminisation of poverty” is a phrase heard frequently today, not only in the popular press, but also in professional groups concerned with women. It suggests that women living alone with their children bear a disproportionate share of the poverty burden. The following questions are discussed: Is this a crisis for American society? Is the standard of living getting worse for women and children, even as it improves for the general population? If it is, why is it happening? And finally, what could be done about it? Data are examined that show that “feminisation of poverty” is a significant problem in the United States. The reasons women are more likely to be poor include inadequate paying jobs, an expanding labourforce, and unique problems associated with female head‐of‐households. Solutions to feminisation of poverty include raising low income jobs via minimum wage and comparable worth legislation, establishing and enforcing realistic child support and spousal maintenance levels, significantly raising the level of public support programmes for children, making available reasonable education‐training‐retraining programmes for women, emphasising the prevention of poverty, and providing better health education and chemical dependency intervention.

“Being poor is a cardinal sin in our society,” one attorney notes in connection with an observation that women face an uphill battle in terms of the effects of poverty on child custody outcomes. Evidence from the same document quotes a Minnesota referee who is renowned for his usual statement to female AFDC recipients:’ How much of the taxpayers money are you currently receiving? (17,p.25)”.

The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize the severe impact on the abilities of urban poor women such as education skills, entrepreneurship qualities, employment skills, creative abilities and social skills, as they face many challenges like inequitable access to work and unacceptable living conditions influenced by an underlying mind-set in the society driven by gender socialization. Though there have been changes in the way we perceive the abilities of urban poor women from being a homemaker to participating in employment and access to education, one cannot deny that discrimination and bias based on gender socialization still exists in the society.

This paper uses secondary data through a systematic review where the inclusion criteria were framed on the basis of relevance, credibility and heterogeneity. However, as this is a concept paper, the study is bereft of empirical data.

In most cases, the ability and potential of women, such as educational skills, entrepreneurship qualities, employment skills, creative abilities and social skills, go unnoticed or, more often, not taken into consideration. Predominantly influenced by gender roles, not all abilities and skills are associated with women; this kind of labelling process refers to gender socialization. Ongoing in society for a long time to an extent, it has been accepted consciously or subconsciously by men and women. As a result, urban poor women, in particular, are further deprived of their capabilities, directly affecting their personal growth and economic status.

Poverty affects men, women, boys and girls, but it is experienced differently by people of different ages, ethnicities, family roles and sex. Moreover, due to women’s biology, social and cultural gender roles and culturally constructed subordination, they are labelled with specific roles dictated by various social agents; This labelling process refers to gender socialization. As a result, capable women with untapped skills, abilities and potential to learn, work, earn, play and develop are ignored or suppressed; hence, they go unnoticed, further intensifying poverty among poor urban women.

The association between income distribution and measures of health has been well established such that societies with smaller income differences between rich and poor people have increased longevity (Wilkinson, 1996). While more egalitarian societies tend to have better health, in most developed societies people lower down the social scale have death rates two to four times higher than those nearer the top. Inequities in income distribution and the consequent disparities in health status are particularly problematic for many women, including single mothers, older women, and women of colour. The feminization of poverty is the rapidly increasing proportion of women in the adult poverty population (Doyal, 1995; Fraser, 1987).

Concern with the size of poverty in any nation leads to a broader question: What does it mean to be poor in a rich society? More specifically, what does it mean for a family, and particularly its children, to live in a state of poverty within a prosperous society? To begin to answer these questions, we must look at poverty in the context of its opposite, plenty. As members of modern societies, we use a wide range of goods and services to effect our participation in social relations and to create and sustain our sense of social identity. The mainstream standard of living defines the average American's family resources that fall sufficiently short of the mainstream as deprivation, precarious subsistence, exclusion – in short, poverty. Our common cultural understanding is that we cannot play our social roles or participate meaningfully in our communities without the basic material resources necessary to carry out our activities. One way or another, each of us has to “make a living” in order to “have a life.” The roles and activities that define participation are age-graded – child, teenager, young adult, mature adult, senior citizen. For any one age, these common cultural understandings allow people to pass judgment on their own rank and that of others in a continuum from destitution to unseemly affluence, based on what kind of participation they can effect.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the influence of household and community characteristics on multidimensional poverty in communities hosting public universities in Ondo state, Nigeria.

The study constructs Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) using Alkire-Foster methodology and uses logistic regression to analyse the likelihood of experiencing multidimensional poverty.

Findings from the study suggest that child schooling attendance, child mortality and asset ownership are the indicators in which households are mostly deprived in education, health and living standards consecutively. In addition, using logistic regression, the study finds multidimensional poverty reducing effects of education, age (before old), household size (having more economically active members), income and residing in urban areas. The study, however, documents that living far away from the universities increases the likelihood of experiencing multidimensional poverty in those communities.

To reduce multidimensional poverty in the communities of study, there is need to implement policies that will improve child schooling, reduce infant mortality, increase gainful employment and create enabling environment for asset ownership. This is in addition to upgrading infrastructure in those communities especially in their fringe areas so that development can spread, and multidimensional poverty reduction can follow in no distant future.

Unlike capturing the effect of location on possibility of experiencing poverty using rural or urban dummy, the authors, in addition to that, incorporate distance to university variable on the premise of distance decay mechanism.

This study investigates female labor force participation (FLFP) in Nigeria, over the period 1990–2020. It analyzes the effect of some poverty indices on FLFP, thereby contributing to the ongoing debate on female labor participation, particularly as it relates to household poverty and its alleviation. The study sources data from World Bank Data Bank and employs autoregressive distributive lags after confirming the stationarity of all variables of interest. While there is no long-run relationship among the variables of interest, the results from the short-run estimate show that one year lagged FLFP, fertility (family size), total unemployment and gender ratio in labor participation are poverty indices that positively influence female labor participation. On the other, female unemployment, male unemployment and GDP growth rate are negative determinants. However, female education and household income per capita as poverty indices are insignificant determinants of female labor participation for the period under study. These findings are important for government/policy-makers in Nigeria to develop a policy framework that can improve poverty in the country as well encourage FLFP in the country since their contributions have meaningful impact in alleviating household poverty and on the entire economy.

The main purpose of this paper is to construct a poverty profile for Sri Lanka, and examine the micro‐level determinants and correlates of poverty.

The study is based on the latest Sri Lanka Integrated Survey commissioned by the World Bank. The unconditional poverty profile was constructed using three different poverty measures (poverty headcount, average poverty gap and squared poverty gap), nested in the Foster‐Greer‐Thorbecke index. The conditional poverty profile was constructed on the basis of a multivariate analysis of poverty correlates. Partial correlates of poverty are computed using two comparable methodologies. First, a logistic regression was estimated, with the probability of a household being in poverty as the dependent variable and a set of economic and demographic variables as correlates. Second, the quantile regression approach was utilized to examine the correlates of per capita consumption at different points on the distribution.

The empirical findings are broadly encouraging. The estimation results show that the education of the household head, being salary employed and being engaged in business have a significant positive effect on the standard of living. The probability of being poor increases with the household size, household head being female, living in a rural area, and being a casual wage earner. These findings indicate the importance of a set of policies which are super pro‐poor, namely increasing school enrolment and achievement, effective family planning programs to reduce the birth rate and dependency load within households, and granting priorities for specific cohorts (children‐, elderly‐, rural‐ and female‐headed households) in targeted interventions.

This is the first study that examines the probable determinants and correlates of Sri Lankan poverty in a multivariate framework employing both logit and quantile regressions.