Urban poor needs to be included in poverty alleviation measures: Experts

In the face of the devastating impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the economy, experts have called for a major rethinking on poverty alleviation approaches built on existing achievements.

The emergence of the new poor during the crisis was not limited only to Bangladesh, they told a webinar on Thursday, identifying the issue as a common policy challenge both regionally and globally.

Despite a huge number of urban people becoming vulnerable due to uncertainty about earnings, rising non-food expenditure, and eroding coping capacity, most of the new poor remain out of the social safety net programmes, they told the event on social protection challenges organised by the Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC).

Urban areas have historically been ignored in social safety net programmes, said PPRC Executive Chairman Hossain Zillur Rahman.

He said no more than 0.44% of the old age allowance allocation goes to the urban poor, while it is 0.05% for widow allowance and 0.26% for disability allowance.

Hossain Zillur identified three new priorities – urban social protection, addressing the new poor, and a new policy-based look at the informal economy.

He said 55% of Bangladesh's GDP comes from the service sector, which mostly comprises various informal enterprises and activities.

Moreover, he said 8% of people remain unemployed a year after the outbreak of Covid-19 while 41% among the unemployed have shifted to jobs requiring lower skills.

People's earnings remain 7% lower than those in the pre-pandemic period, with the reduction being 14% in urban areas, he said.

He further said non-food expenditure increased by 98% last year due to the rise in rent, health expenditure, transportation costs and prices of utilities.

The capacity of most urban people to deal with financial stress has eroded due to reduced savings and a doubling of debt in terms of annual income, he noted.

He said 24.5 million people have fallen below the poverty line.

He observed that the government has increased the size of the social safety net programmes to a very small degree in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis and that too has mainly been focused on repurposing.

Dr Shamsul Alam, a member of the General Economics Division at the Planning Commission, said no amount of planning could have anticipated the massive disruptive impact of the Covid-19 crisis.

It is important, in light of the crisis, to adopt a learning approach, he said.  

He welcomed the rethinking on urban social protection and reflected on the importance of engaging established and credible non-governmental organisations in the official response to the urban social protection agenda.

Usha Mishra, chief of social policy at the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) in Nepal, talked about the Himalayan country's response that involved some innovations, such as subsidies on electricity consumption of distressed urban families and the push for a universal child grant.

Qazi Azmat Isa, chief executive officer of Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund, described the country's response, pointing to the success of the Covid-19 response to the social assistance programme's quick rollout due to prior investment in updating databases and using new, digitally verifiable eligibility criteria, such as phone usage time.

In particular, the flagship Ehsaas programme was repurposed with additional components to cover the new poor, he said.  

Asif Saleh, executive director of Brac Bangladesh, said the new poor do not belong to a homogeneous category and a one-size-fits-all approach will not work.

He described Brac's response, which focused on some specific categories of the new poor, such as returnee migrants and urban families forced to relocate to other urban or rural areas without any livelihood strategy.

The webinar drew to an end with the publication of the PPRC-BIGD research, titled "Livelihoods, Coping and Recovery during the Covid-19 Crisis." It was jointly launched by Hossain Zillur Rahman and Imran Matin, executive director of the Brac Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD).