Poverty is the inability to maintain a minimal standard of living. It consists of two elements. The first is the expenditure necessary to buy a minimal standard of nutrition while the second element varies from country to country and reflects specific national normative concepts of welfare. As societies become wealthier, perceptions of the acceptable minimum level of consumption also change. Consequently, poverty is a context-specific concept and, as such, is very much a moving target (See DANIDA,1996).
The EVSE are an extremely heterogeneous grouping. Being able to identify and target services at specific, well defined groups is one of the main challenges in designing and implementing poverty reduction programmes. The main defining features of the poor are: nature of employment (waged/self-employed/unemployed); gender and age (male/female, adult/youth/child); extent of physical and mental disability (able-bodied/disabled); location (rural/urban/peri-urban); sector (farm/non-farm, specific activity); household characteristics (size, dependency ratios, male/female headed); degree and duration of poverty; specific 'minority groups' who suffer from particular forms of discrimination and/or neglect; and populations affected by war and natural disasters.
It is estimated that there are currently around 1.3 billion people living in absolute poverty in the developing world. Table 1 shows that 56 per cent of the absolutely poor (i.e. those living on less than a US dollar a day) live in South Asia and Sub Saharan Africa (SSA). The poor are heavily concentrated among small, resource poor farmers and those engaged in a wide range of manufacturing and service activities in the largely non-regulated, rural and urban informal sectors (see Tokman and Klein, 1996). There are no reliable estimates of the overall size of the informal sector. Typically, in SSA and South Asian countries, well over 60 percent of urban populations are employed in the informal sector.
Women and disabled persons are particularly susceptible to poverty. Consequently, policy measures that target both these groups, in particular by reducing labour discrimination and improving human capital should be a central feature of all poverty reduction programmes. While the need to tackle the 'gendered nature of poverty' is increasingly emphasised in policy discourses, "the condition of the disabled is at the bottom of the development agenda" (Ghai in Harriss-White, 1996:i). In India, for example, there are more seriously disabled people than there are seriously malnourished ones. In Asia as a whole, four per cent of the population are seriously disabled (see ILO/ARTEP, 1994). In many countries, particularly those in post-conflict situations, this percentage is much higher. In Uganda, for example, there are 800,000 disabled people.
Among the 'economically vulnerable', there is an enormous range in the level of economic and social well being. At one extreme, are the most marginal groups (including the destitute, beggars, street children) while, at the other, are those with regular, relatively secure sources of income (such as the operators of well established microenterprises) who may occasionally fall below a national poverty line (1). To date, 'training for the poor' has mainly benefited relatively better-off groups among the EVSE mainly because they are more 'reachable'/ 'investable' and are more likely, therefore, to have identifiable training needs. However, although the most economically vulnerable are generally the hardest to reach, the potential 'pay-offs' of being able to reduce significantly the number of people who are living in the greatest poverty are enormous.
Identifying the contribution that training can make to reducing levels of poverty among the myriad of economically vulnerable groups is a major challenge for researchers and policymakers. For some groups (in particular, illegal child labour), the need for any kind of training intervention may itself be called in to question. Thus, the role of training in poverty reduction must be situated in a wider analysis of the causes of economic vulnerability. With regard to employment issues, there are three sets of explanatory factors that must be disentangled: lack of human capital, presence of labour market discrimination and other distortions, and poor macroeconomic and labour market conditions.
EMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING PAPERS 43 Learning to change: Skills development among the economically vulnerable and socially excluded in developing countries Paul Bennell Employment and Training Department International Labour Office Geneva First published 1999
To learn more about this author, visit International Labour Organization's Website.
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