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Urban Poverty
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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development seeks to address the problems of persistent and concentrated urban poverty and is dedicated to understanding how social and economic changes affect low-income communities and their residents. Based in Cleveland, the Center views the city as both a tool for building communities and producing change locally, and as a representative urban center from which nationally-relevant research and policy implications can be drawn.
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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development (CUPCD) is based in a university context as part of the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. The Mandel School strongly emphasizes direct work with local city-wide and community institutions to address the opportunities and problems of poor neighborhoods. The CUPCD mission is "to create, communicate, and apply knowledge of value to a broad range of audiences and constituents concerned with the ultimate goal of reducing urban poverty and its consequences. . . . The Center serves as a pathway between the university, and the community, linking social science to social change."
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Many donor agencies are recognizing the need to address the growing levels of urban poverty in Africa, Latin America and much of Asia. Many ... acknowledge that they had under-estimated the scale of urban poverty. As they develop or expand programmes on poverty reduction in urban areas, there are many remarkable initiatives on whose experience they can draw. This paper reflects on the lessons from seven of these : three from Asia, three from Latin America and one from Africa. All these initiatives combined direct action by low-income groups themselves, working with local NGOs, with some support negotiated from one or more external agency in order to improve housing and living conditions, basic services and livelihoods. Each initiative sought to make limited funding go as far as possible- and most achieved partial or total cost recovery for some (or all) of their interventions.
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As with urban poverty, an important part of rural poverty is lack of services such as schools, health care, and access to credit. The links between poor health and poverty are strong because most rural poor lack easy access to health services while facing multiple health risks in their home and work environments. The reason most rural dwellers lack services is their distance from facilities that provide the services. For most poor urban households, the reason is inability to access nearby services. A squatter household living 200 meters from a hospital, secondary school, or bank or 40 to 50 meters from a water main or sewer can be as effectively excluded from these services as a rural resident 30 kilometers away.
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The absolute and relative growth in urban poverty and malnutrition raises two important issues. First, there is a clear link with food insecurity among urban populations. Studies have shown a link between the growth in underweight children in urban families and the inability of their families to purchase food. Second, there is evidence that instability in the urban labor market and its vulnerability to economic shocks directly impact on
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[Y]et, poverty rates in the urban sector have not improved. The urban poor work harder and earn less. Labour income is the main and often the only source of income for the urban poor. In Mexico, 57 per cent of the income of the poorest urban quintile comes from manual labour, which is higher than the Latin American average.
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Urban Poverty