Where are we on the road to zero poverty? Reflections from CPAN Associates in East and Southern Africa

October 15, 2024 CPAN

The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty is upon us once more, with renewed urgency to reinvigorate action to get to zero poverty. Below, select CPAN Associates provide high level reflections, part of an ongoing discussion of how realistic this goal remains in regions of sub-Saharan Africa.

Fighting extreme poverty remains an uphill task in southern Africa

By Blessings Chinsinga

Extreme poverty remains widespread, deep and severe in southern Africa. Estimates pre-pandemic found that that 88 million people (about 45.1% of the population) lived in extreme poverty. It is moreover estimated that over 40 million more people are expected to face extreme poverty by 2040.

Most countries in the region have not been able to create institutional and social foundations for structural changes to facilitate transformative and sustainable development. On top of this, Covid-19 has had a devastating impact on southern African economies leading to rising poverty, inequality and unemployment. Lack of economic diversification is slowing down the recovery process, especially since commodities play a disproportionate role in most of these economies.

Recovery efforts have been further hampered by a litany of adverse climatic episodes including severe droughts, heavy rains and flash flooding. Some countries have endured successive bouts of cyclones (for example, cyclone Ana, Idai and Freddy) with devastating impacts on their agricultural sectors as well as their basic infrastructure. The Russian-Ukraine war has simply exacerbated the situation. Fertilizers are no longer affordable to most farmers, further crippling the predominantly agrarian economies in the region. The war has also had a negative impact on the prices of various basic commodities worsening the living standards of many people in the region.

Several strategies could potentially reverse southern Africa’s pessimistic outlook on its efforts to eradicate extreme poverty. Robust social protection programmes, especially social cash transfers, are proving effective in changing and diversifying livelihood opportunities of its participants.

Alongside this, agricultural support programmes could play a vital role in the recovery efforts especially for countries reeling from successive bouts of cyclones or droughts. Job creation more broadly, especially through climate smart interventions including those targeting youth, could help support the region’s efforts to adapt to the adverse effects of climate change.

Achievement of substantive gender equality must be central to all policies and programmes by dealing with impediments that limit the economic independence and security of women.

All these efforts require reconfiguring the state to serve as a vehicle for meaningful development and sustainable structural transformation. Through decentralization policy reforms, widely adopted in the region, efforts must be made to genuinely empower people in poverty to play an active part in designing and implementing programmes that are meant to benefit them.

For more on CPAN policy recommendations to get to zero poverty in southern Africa, see:

Microeconomic support for poverty eradication in East Africa, with a focus on Ethiopia and Tanzania

By Judith Kahamba and Yisak Tafere

The successive and multiple crises overlaying structural challenges have deterred East Africa’s promising economic growth. Drought and the COVID-19 pandemic hit Tanzania and Ethiopia hard in the last years. In Ethiopia, the war in Tigray and more recent devaluation of the national currency following the Foreign Exchange Directive has amplified challenges. Tanzanians face various dimensions of vulnerability to poverty on account of climate-related crises and health shocks on the back of weak structural economic transformation, low education levels, limited growth elasticity of poverty and limited public spending on sectors critical for people in and near poverty such as agriculture and health.

The impact of these crises and stressors on poverty reduction has been visible. For example, between 2015 and 2022, absolute poverty and income inequality has increased in Ethiopia. In Tanzania, strong growth has not consistently translated into poverty reduction.

So, what can be done amidst these challenges? In both countries, the governments have implemented various policies and strategies to reduce poverty. With regards to social protection Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Program is hailed as one of the most ambitious social protection programmes on the continent. The Tanzania Social Action Fund’s Conditional Cash Transfer and Productive Social Safety Nets also seek to reduce extreme poverty through cash transfers to vulnerable populations.

Continued and increased investment in productive social safety net programs is still crucial in reducing vulnerability to extreme poverty. Reversing external cutbacks will be needed in contexts where international assistance has considerably supported country poverty reduction strategies.

Alongside this, a host of complementary measures are needed. This includes increasing public expenditure on agriculture to improve access to production inputs, irrigation technologies, better infrastructure, and market linkages, as well as proper coordination of the private actors along the key crop, livestock and fisheries value chains. Engagement of the private sector needs to promote climate smart agriculture to overcome the challenge of weather vulnerability in both countries.

With a larger population in the informal sector, the government also needs to invest in human capital and skills development and create a better enabling environment that fosters small enterprises to grow and survive, such as reasonable business taxes and promoting favorable microfinance services to reduce informal sector actors’ vulnerabilities to poverty, especially during external shocks.

For more on CPAN policy recommendations to get to zero poverty in East Africa, see:

Renewing the commitment to social protection in sub-Saharan Africa

By Adeniran Adedeji

Sound macroeconomic stability, debt relief, rising commodity prices, strong global market demand, and favourable trade policies helped some sub-Saharan African countries reduce their poverty rates pre-pandemic. However, poverty reduction was already stalling in many countries prior to COVID-19. Key economic fundamentals in the region have since deteriorated along these metrics, and addressing the root causes of stagnant growth will be critical to reversing the negative poverty trajectory.

To make meaningful progress, additional tools for poverty reduction are necessary. A structured social protection framework could be one of the missing pieces in the policy toolkit, as reinforced above. Historically, social protection in the region has been fragmented, largely donor-driven, and lacked proper targeting mechanisms. The weaknesses in social transfer programs became apparent during the shocks of COVID-19.

However, the pandemic also served as a catalyst for revamping social protection programs across the subcontinent, with many countries introducing social registries and establishing institutional frameworks for social protection. Scaling up these efforts, coordinating social protection initiatives, and enhancing the role of key actors in funding and policy coordination will be crucial for sustained progress in poverty reduction.

Revamping the social protection delivery mechanism is also crucial. Digital technologies can support mapping the vulnerable groups and better targeting of the poor. Innovations that reduce leakages and improve the efficiency of social transfers will be needed in fighting corruption effectively.

For more on CPAN policy recommendations centred on social protection, see:

Forging renewed commitments towards eradicating extreme poverty

October 17, 2023 CPAN

By: Keetie Roelen and Vidya Diwakar

Blog in observance of 17 October 2023, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

‘Decent Work and Social Protection: Putting Dignity in Practice for All’ is the theme of this year’s UN International Day for the Eradication of Poverty held on 17 October. Enabling these outcomes and practices is more pertinent than ever. According to recent reports, the world is currently off track to meet the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1 on ending extreme poverty by 2030. The Covid-19 pandemic, rising food and fuel prices, debt and other intersecting crises including climate change and conflict are making lives more precarious and creating new poverty traps.

This changing landscape requires a rethink of the most appropriate and effective ways to reduce poverty and help people to navigate precarity, respond to shocks and increase resilience.

On 27 and 28 September 2023, the Centre for the Study of Global Development at the Open University hosted the international workshop ‘Poverty Reduction: Rethinking Policy and Practice’. Co-hosted by the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network at the Institute of Development Studies, and supported by the Development Studies Association and EADI networks, the hybrid workshop welcomed 45 participants from around the world to discuss the current state of affairs and share ideas for getting back on track towards ending extreme poverty.

As co-organisers, we reflect on four of the key take-aways of the workshop discussions.

1. Linking poverty eradication to the climate change agenda

First, the short- to medium-term future of poverty reduction does not look good. Projections and new estimates presented at the workshop suggest a best-case scenario of stagnating poverty rates over the next few years, sometimes concentrated in challenging contexts of conflict and various sources of fragility including those due to climate risk. More pessimistic estimates indicate that poverty may even increase.

Yet despite the continued scale of the challenge, workshop participants expressed concerns on how poverty eradication seems to have slipped down the development agenda.

Linking the poverty eradication and climate change agendas more closely could be a means of renewing international commitments towards poverty reduction, given the reinforcing relationships that underpin these global challenges.

2. Balancing resilience-building with recovery programming

Second, intersecting crises only amplify the scale of the challenges experienced by people in and near poverty, and can act to drive downward mobility, as observed during Covid-19. There is moreover a convergence of conflict fatalities, climate-related disasters and high numbers of people in and near poverty in certain low- and lower-middle income countries.

In this context, anti-poverty programming that seeks to respond to intersecting crises requires strengthening. Resilience-building is one such means of pre-emptively addressing multiple crises. At the same time, given the salience and chronicity of these crises, there needs to be a stronger focus on recovery programming such that it goes on for much longer than it currently does.

3. Responding to structural change within decent work and social protection strategies

Third, social protection and broader anti-poverty programming remain spaces for exciting new initiatives and exploration of novel individual, household and community-based interventions, or components thereof. From needs-based case work to use of digital tools to improve village savings and loan associations or public works programmes, there is no shortage of ideas to try and make programming more effective while at the same placing humanity and dignity at its centre.

At the same time, there was strong recognition that more bottom-up approaches can only succeed in an enabling environment. Structural factors, including continued manifestations of global coloniality, and macro policies – to stimulate economic growth, establish labour market conditions, or prioritise public spending – ultimately determine the conditions for success of poverty reduction interventions. An important recurrent theme was the enormous cost of mounting levels of debt for many low-income countries, and the considerable pressures this puts on their public resources.

4. Centring frontline workers in poverty eradication programming

Fourth, the human relationships linking people in poverty to higher-level policymaking are often overlooked or undervalued yet remain vital in achieving poverty reduction. Community leaders, frontline workers and shopkeepers selling subsidised food items, for example, are at the forefront of delivering services, and often also wield considerable power over the allocation of resources themselves.

This makes frontline workers crucial stakeholders in strengthening the social contract between citizens and the state, and holding governments to account. At a more human level, they are at the forefront of ensuring support is delivered in inclusive and dignity-enhancing ways. More research into the relationships between frontline workers and the populations they serve, and more support for these workers, is needed to strengthen the dignified delivery of anti-poverty programming.

Note: this blog was simultaneously published on CSGD, CPAN, IDS, EADI and DSA websites in recognition of this year’s International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

Charting pathways to zero poverty amidst complex crises

October 17, 2022 CPAN

By: Vidya Diwakar and Andrew Shepherd

Can progress on poverty eradication be rescued? TheWorld Bank has recently called for course correction but their fiscal recovery-focused blueprint is only part of the solution given the scale of the challenge. Instead, we need to forge a more ambitious transformative pathway to zero poverty amidst layered crises, including the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change and conflict. We can do this by collectively supporting “dignity for all in practice” through commitments towards “social justice, peace, and the planet”—the theme of this year’s International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (17 October).

Layered crises obstruct focus on recovery

Pre-pandemic there was a slowdown in progress and some retrogression in poverty reduction. This was followed by significant impoverishment during the pandemic, and a turbulent post-pandemic political, military and economic environment marked by new or amplified crises linked to inflation, energy and food scarcities, conflict and climate change.

Not long after the beginning of the pandemic there was much talk of building back (or forward) better which meant greener, more inclusively. Governments optimistically developed recovery plans.

However, political preoccupations have since moved on to other crises. Indeed, the pandemic was barely treated as an emergency with full involvement of key national and international disaster-focused actors. It was instead largely treated as a health crisis, and the response was primarily a health and macro-economic one – important, but completely inadequate to the task of preventing impoverishment. The World Bank’s course correction blueprint and several discussions at its recent Annual Meetings largely builds on this macroeconomic policy focus.

Yet we know that the crisis was so much more, especially for people in and near poverty, who have found their room for manoeuvre and agency additionally constrained. So where is a dignified recovery for those millions of people already struggling with life and for whom these layered crises form a real setback? And what can be done to accelerate progress towards more peaceful, environmentally sustainable, and inclusive societies amidst layered crises?

Centring ‘social justice, peace and the planet’

First, responding to crises trajectories is essential. Given the multiple nature and duration of the shocks produced during the pandemic alone, it should have been treated as a rapid-onset disaster with slow-onset stressors that continue to prolong its impacts today. Loss of livelihoods, loss of jobs, food insecurity, school closures and displacement of migrants were some of the shocks immediately felt. However, the depressed economies, food and energy price rises, and sustained school dropouts continue to create longer-term, slower-onset conditions likely to drive the intergenerational persistence of poverty.

Second, risk management strategies need to consider the layering of crises. Conflict and climate-induced shocks and stressors add to pressures and affect people’s ability to cope. Even in countries not typically classified as conflict-affected or ‘fragile’ states, subnational areas of violence may limit recovery efforts. Climate change is also having disproportionate effects on the poorest, and so equitable and environmentally sustainable pathways are key.

Finally, underlying vulnerabilities of people and communities can amplify crises. As such, a challenge in crises is to sustain the additional commitments of expenditure needed in other key areas (health, education, expanded and adaptive social transfers and social protection, agriculture, economic development including in the informal economy) to support people’s agency and also address sources of vulnerability. This involves extended targeting to include vulnerable people, and a focus within that on social groups especially badly affected in the pandemic – migrants, children in education, women informal workers, to name a few.

Transformative change during crises

How can the strategies above contribute to transformative change? Treating the pandemic and crises that followed as a longer-term humanitarian emergency of multiple disasters requires a transformation in its response: these should involve conflict-sensitive disaster risk management linked to public health responses, and peacebuilding activities within adaptive management frameworks. Instead, the history of emergency measures giving way too quickly to development – an aspect of the humanitarian-development divide – continues today.

The commitments to social expenditure listed above is just a first step towards tackling the structural inequalities that might prevent access to quality human development and livelihoods – and are transformative. Transformation can also be achieved by reasserting and upholding people’s human rights, and allowing and supporting the voice and agency of people in poverty so that they are better able to articulate their needs and engage in decision-making about their futures.

Too often we see international agencies and governments removed from the realities of people’s lived experiences. Real transformation towards poverty eradication in contexts of complex crises starts from a premise of sustained risk-informed, people-centred change that asks vulnerable groups about their changing needs amidst crises and responds in real-time through adaptive and participatory decision-making.

In an era when some governments have become more authoritarian and in which the international order is not only in flux but at loggerheads amongst elites, this has become a greater ask. However, there are authoritarian governments which are committed to parts of the agenda. And there are also places where democratic processes have been reaffirmed and progressive governments installed, which offer some hope.

Getting to zero poverty by 2030 - an Infographic by CPAN

October 21, 2015 CPAN

This infographic CPAN aims to give an overall picture of the complexity and the dynamics that can trap people in a situation of chronic poverty, and to suggest the cross-cutting policy areas that need to be taken into account when aiming at tackling chronic poverty, stop impoverishment, build sustained escape from poverty.