Search

This paper contributes to the debate on the link between poverty and artisanal and small‐scale mining (ASM) – low‐tech, labour‐intensive mineral extraction and processing – in sub‐Saharan Africa. It specifically seeks to advance discussion on the idea that throughout the region, the sector’s operators are trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty. Drawing upon ongoing research being conducted on marginalized women engaged in ASM in Ghana, an attempt is made to further nuance the ‘poverty trap‐ASM’ narrative. In the context of sub‐Saharan Africa, debates on this issue should focus on the challenges faced by marginalized groups such as women, in particular how their growing dependence upon monies earned from the sector for their livelihoods has increased their vulnerability.

Past research has shown that sexual abuse increases vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. However, little is known about the context of different cultural traditions and how they affect women's risk. This study used data from two studies conducted in the United States and West Africa, and purposefully selected semi-structured interviews of those reporting sexual abuse. Data were collected from 2006 to 2009 (United States) and 2014 to 2015 (West Africa), and analyzed using an interpretive team approach. Findings revealed that most study participants lived with personal shame and stigma; they were silent about the abuse they suffered to protect themselves and their families. Those providing mental and physical health services to women with HIV/AIDS must be cognizant of these cultural issues and the continuing cycle of poverty and abuse that put these women at risk.

Proponents of global market expansion claim that economic growth brings prosperity and creates a more equitable global society, yet these efforts may result in the exacerbation of economic disparities that translates into significant disparities in health. These trends underscore the importance of research examining the social determinants of health in an increasingly unequal world. This article brings together concepts from biocultural anthropology, developmental origins of health and disease, and research examining the long-term effects of early environments on social capital to formulate the notion of biosocial inheritance. Biosocial inheritance is the process whereby social adversity in one generation is transmitted to the next through reinforcing biological and social mechanisms that impair health, exacerbating social and health disparities. Such a theoretical framework considers contemporary and historic political-economic forces that shape inequalities in human health, across generations. We examine the biosocial determinants of growth in the Andes as a case study of biosocial inheritance, developing a model that will illuminate the contemporary and historic sources of persistent poverty in low-income communities around the world. By highlighting the biosocial mechanisms underpinning the intergenerational transmission of poverty, this model allows for the formulation of interventions aimed at breaking the cycle of poverty and a reconsideration of the way we think about poverty and social mobility.

Individuals, households, and businesses in developed countries take for granted access to the wide variety of products and services offered by modern banking and insurance industries. Unfortunately, the ability of world's urban and rural poor to access these same services has historically been limited. As a result, low-income households often have inadequate opportunity to finance a business, few formal options to save money, and insurance is often unavailable that leaves them with no alternative but to sell productive assets or to radically reduce consumption to finance loss shocks. Research has shown this inability to save, borrow, and insure leads to a cycle of poverty that is difficult to leave and even more difficult to leave permanently. A little over 30 years ago the Grameen Bank launched an experiment designed to see if loan products could be targeted to the poorest households in Bangladesh. The group lending innovation Grameen introduced proved successful, and a new sustainable business model was created such that microcredit could be offered to the poor on reasonable terms with high customer take-up rates. The microfinance industry was born and today represents opportunity for poor households to tap their entrepreneurial spirit and build toward a better life. Although access to credit proved to be an important innovation, all too often development and microfinance professionals heard stories of households that had invested year after year to build a small business only to have that progress eliminated by a single loss event. Perhaps this is not surprising as researchers have long noted the vulnerability of the poor to loss shocks (both in terms of likelihood and severity as these events are often large relative to household income), and their ability to informally manage these shocks is inefficient at best (Murdoch, 1999). Even worse, although covariant risks are difficult for any community to manage efficiently, research has also shown the informal risk-sharing mechanisms used by the poor are inefficient even for idiosyncratic, diversifiable risks (see, e.g., Jalan and Ravallion, 1999). Given the recognition that poor households have limited options to efficiently manage risk and that this inability is a significant determinant of remaining in (or re-entering) poverty, pressure has been mounting to find ways to help the poor more efficiently finance or transfer risk through formal insurance markets. A prominent example of this rallying cry is the World Bank's 2000/2001 World Development Report, in which the authors made "Enhancing Security" by "reducing vulnerability to risk" one of the major objectives in an overall strategy to reduce extreme poverty (World Bank, 2001). Since then, the Bank, along with several other international organizations, has engaged a global campaign to develop microinsurance markets. Although excitement exists about the prospect for insurance targeted to the poor, the market for microinsurance today can probably best be described as in its infancy. Unlike microcredit where Grameen Bank introduced a major innovation that produced a dramatically different outcome, to date no single advance has emerged that has revolutionized the approach insurers have to contract with poor in a way that mitigates the informational and transactional costs associated with supplying insurance at prices that poor consumers are willing to pay. As a result, there is extensive experimentation in the design and distribution of microinsurance as market participants search for strategies that will unlock its potential for low-income households. Recognizing the need for the proponents of microinsurance to learn what works and what does not, in 2005 Munich Re Foundation hosted its first annual international conference designed to bring the early innovators together to facilitate knowledge sharing. The conference attracted 100 attendees representing international organizations, NGOs, insurers, and development agencies coming from 24 countries. …

The epicentre of the global HIV epidemic is southern Africa. Previous explanations point to migration patterns and highly skewed income distribution, both thought to promote risky sexual behaviour. This study emphasizes the importance of common infectious and parasitic diseases that increase the likelihood of HIV transmission by increasing contagiousness and vulnerability to infection. Using multiple regression analysis on country-level data, the authors find that socio-economic variables explain statistically only one-tenth of the difference in HIV prevalence between southern Africa and other low- and middle-income countries. Measures of five cofactor infections together with the socio-economic variables, however, explain statistically about two-thirds of the southern Africa difference in HIV prevalence. They conclude that the relative affluence of countries in southern Africa and historical migration patterns have tended to mask the vulnerability of the majority of their populations who are poor and who have very high prevalence of infectious and parasitic diseases. Those diseases replicate a cycle of poverty that produces biological vulnerability through coinfections. An important implication of this research is that integrating treatment of endemic diseases with other HIV-prevention policies may be necessary to slow the spread of HIV.

This article analyzes a decade of qualitative research to identify and explore an overlooked survival strategy used in low-income families: children's family labor. Defined as physical duties, caregiving, and household management responsibilities, children's-most often girls'-family labor is posited as a critical source of support where low wages and absent adult caregivers leave children to take over essential, complex, and time-consuming family demands. We argue that there are lost opportunities when children are detoured from childhood to do family labor and that an intergenerational transfer of poverty is associated with those losses. Key Words: caregiving, child care, children, girls, low-income, work-family. Low-income working families have long devised nonmonetary strategies to manage daily life (Edin & Lein, 1997; Furstenberg, Cook, Eccles, Elder, & Sameroff, 1999; Stack, 1974) in large part because they cannot afford market alternatives. One of these strategies is shared caregiving, or reciprocity and kin care, but recent research suggests that relative care may be less available than has been presumed (Gerstel & Gallagher, 1994; Roschelle, 1997a). Work and family scholarship in general has focused on the strategies used by middle-class and dual-career families, with less research on low-income and single-mother families (Dodson & Bravo, 2003; Heymann, 2000). Although researchers have examined children's household work, largely in the context of whether doing chores benefits children (Goodnow, 1988), the use of children to provide family labor-physical duties, caregiving, and domestic management responsibilities critical to family survival-is absent from most work and family scholarship. A review of recent scholarship about low-income working families reveals that parents face formidable challenges taking care of children and households while meeting the demands of low-wage jobs (Munger, 2002). Moreover, the wages of many underskilled workers are insufficient to support a family (Bernstein, Brocht, & Spade-Aguilar, 2000). Although an increase in publicly funded child care has accompanied the loss of welfare, government-subsidized child care serves a small percentage of all eligible families (Mezey, Schumacher, Greenberg, Lombardi, & Hutchins, 2002). This article examines children's family labor, arguing that low earnings and parental absence due to employment push significant care and household work onto children-particularly girls-as a family coping or survival strategy. Moreover, our data show that in low-income America, when children focus on family labor, there is an opportunity cost-a loss of attention to their own development-contributing to an intergenerational cycle of poverty and near poverty, largely from mother to daughter. Using a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), the first author identified the theme of low-income children's family work while conducting several studies in the 1990s in which children's family labor was noteworthy in its complexity, importance to respondents, and prevalence. Subsequently, between 1998 and 2002, researchers conducted additional research about children's nonmonetary contributions to family life. This article describes types of children's family labor that emerged repeatedly during these studies. We use rich, triangulated qualitative data to examine respondents' understanding of children's work for family as economic necessity but also in the context of gender and race or ethnic cultural obligations. We conclude that low-income children commonly perform family labor and thus spend less time on school and extracurricular activities, resulting in profound opportunity costs and foregone and forgotten dreams. Our methodological experience cautions us that low-income parents are often reluctant to divulge details about their family patterns, maintaining oblique habits of survival in low-wage America. …

This study offers a longitudinal scrutiny of the development of pension policy in Finland and evaluates the impacts that the shift from a “marginal” to an “institutional” welfare state imposed on economic well-being among the elderly. The data that are used stem from household budget surveys from 1966 to 1990. During that period, average income of the elderly doubled in real terms, legislated pensions replaced other sources of income, the traditional cycle of poverty, where the elderly had a higher risk of poverty, disappeared, and income differences between the elderly diminished.

The author presents research in progress, exploring the Poverty of Culture as a refutation of the mythical ‘cycle of poverty’ sustained by the older Culture of Poverty.

The oral health status of 454 children and 115 adults from a population of migrant and seasonal farm workers in Florida was assessed. The prevalence of disease among the children was consistent with that reported for other black children of this age. The migrants had received more dental treatment than the children of seasonal farm workers; however, the level of care for both groups was strikingly low. The results of this neglect were clearly reflected in the mouths of the adults, most of which were found to be in a very deteriorated state of dental health. A program to cope with these long unmet needs is unrealistic. Efforts should be made to eliminate pain and infection until the cycle of poverty can be broken.