This paper investigates the role of crises (e.g. armed conflict, displacement, climate-related disasters, Covid‑19, and economic crises) in driving negative poverty trajectories in Nigeria, alongside the extent to which social assistance may be fit for purpose to respond to intersecting crises. The paper adopts a mixed-methods approach, bringing together analysis of quantitative survey data from 2010 to 2023, with qualitative data collected in six states across the country’s six geopolitical zones in 2023. Study findings point to intersecting crises driving both the acuteness of chronic poverty as well as new instances of impoverishment that are becoming sustained. Social assistance – albeit constrained by limited coverage – plays an important role by supporting promotive and protective means of coping during crises. Based on the study findings, policy recommendations include expanding social assistance coverage, strengthening conflict resolution and peace-building, promoting equity-centred economic policy responses, and addressing underlying structural challenges.
Social Assistance and Coping With Crises in Borno, Nigeria
This paper examines the relationship between social assistance, violent conflict, and intersecting crises, and considers how social assistance can help offset erosive forms of coping that could otherwise drive poverty and food insecurity.
To investigate these issues, the study draws on newly collected household data covering 1,000 survey respondents in 2023 from the Konduga and Maiduguri Municipal Council local government areas in Borno, Nigeria. Borno has been an epicentre for violence over the past 15 years, and has experienced a range of intersecting crises.
Study findings indicate that 43 per cent of households experienced disruptions to income or agriculture, or asset loss, either due to conflict, flooding, or drought. Of these households, 41 per cent reported that more than half of their income source was lost. Despite the negative effects of crises, only 1 in 10 households received social assistance in the year preceding the survey, mainly through non-governmental organisations. This indicates that social assistance is simply not getting through to the people who need it.
Perhaps as a result, households are increasingly drawing on negative and even erosive forms of coping – for example, by being less able to save, less able to make investments, and increasing reliance on loans that together could drive downward mobility. The paper concludes with broad-brush implications for social assistance programmes to become more effective amidst violence and climate-related disasters.
The paper is authored by Vidya Diwakar, Adedeji Peter Adeniran, Emmanuel Nwosu, Fidelis Obaniyi, Chisom Udora
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 160: The Dynamics of Poverty - Creating Resilience to Sustain Progress
The World Social Report 2025 (forthcoming) will offer a survey of social challenges that stand in the way of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. A series of thematic papers is being developed by UNDESA to provide more detailed analysis on each of these challenges, including the core commitments from the 1995 Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action. The first of the thematic papers focuses on poverty, and draws on a background paper produced by Andrew Shepherd and Vidya Diwakar. Linked to the thematic paper and its associated policy brief are presented here.
The thematic paper recognizes that world has made significant headway towards eradicating poverty in recent decades. Accelerating the speed of progress and avoiding setbacks remain critical challenges. While poverty is increasingly entrenched in the poorest countries and regions, the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent crises have exposed that gains are fragile, even in countries that had succeeded in reducing it. Growing evidence on the dynamics of poverty shows that many people are still one misfortune away from falling below the poverty line. Many do so, despite declines in the total number of people in poverty. Progress in reducing it is much more volatile than the conventional, aggregate picture of gradual reductions suggests. Covid-19 and the growing threats from climate change and conflict serve as yet another reminder that reaching the elusive goal of eradicating poverty is not only a matter of lifting people above it. It also requires creating resilience.
World survey on the role of women in development 2024: Harnessing social protection for gender equality, resilience and transformation
Front cover of report
The “World survey on the role of women in development” is presented every five years to the Economic and Financial Committee of the United Nations General Assembly. It provides a unique opportunity to put gender equality issues on the economic policy agenda and bring together perspectives on human rights and sustainable development.
This ninth edition (UN document A/79/111) takes stock of progress, gaps, and challenges in building comprehensive, gender-responsive social protection systems. It provides examples and recommendations on how these systems can better protect women and girls from poverty and deprivation, strengthen their resilience to shocks, and transform social norms, structures, and institutions that keep them from realizing their full potential.
To produce the report, UN Women brought together researchers, policymakers, civil society actors, and UN system partners. The report draws on their collective expertise to provide guidance to policymakers and support advocacy for a new generation of gender-responsive social protection systems equipped to uphold rights and advance sustainable development.
Vidya Diwakar made important contributions to the report, particularly through informing Chapter 1, section C, alongside a forthcoming background report.
Financial Inclusion & Resilience Across the Humanitarian, Development and Peace Nexus
We live in an era of uncertainty marked by intersecting crises, shocks, and stressors; these circumstances undermine food, nutrition, and economic security as well as productive livelihoods, health, and safety. In this context, significant attention and resources are devoted to strategies that build household and community resilience in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Notwithstanding progress to date on prioritizing resilience approaches to achieve key outcomes across the humanitarian-development-peace (HDP)nexus, evidence suggests significant additional potential for using financial inclusion strategies to promote resilience.
This working paper describes some of the current, evidence-based thinking on the roles that financial inclusion can play in fostering household and community resilience in response to varying types of vulnerability, risks, and crises. It outlines the types of benefits that financial inclusion can accrue to poor households and communities when integrated within broader resilience-focused services. It first presents a multi-sectoral resilience framework to embed financial inclusion (and financial capitals) as a key part of a gender-sensitive resilient system. It recognizes as part of the context the array of shocks, stressors, and crises prevalent today, and accordingly the need for people in and near poverty to adapt to local realities of climate, violent conflict, and pandemics such as COVID-19 that drive and amplify financial risks.
In this process, it focuses especially on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) from across Southeast Asia, subSaharan Africa, and Latin America. In doing so, it aims to provide insights to national policymakers in LMICs as well as to international development practitioners on the most promising sets of interventions and partnerships that can catalyze sustainable financial inclusion among people in and near poverty amid crises.
The cross-country data on financial inclusion and crises suggests that: people living in areas with limited ability to adapt to climate change also have low savings and limited access to timely, affordable finance (savings, credit, insurance, or transfers) which may reinforce their vulnerabilities in times of climate-related disasters; people in and near poverty living in fragile, conflict-affected situations experience difficulties in coming up with funds to cope with emergencies during times of crises; and many people in and near poverty turned to informal sources as a means of coping with the income loss experienced during COVID-19.
The Capability Approach and the Sustainable Development Goals: Inter/Multi/Trans Disciplinary Perspectives
This book demonstrates how the capability approach to human development can contribute to the realisation of the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The capability approach dictates that success should not be measured by economic indicators but by people leading meaningful, free, fulfilled, happy, or satisfied lives. Drawing from a range of disciplinary perspectives, this book argues that it is vital that the focus for the SDGs should shift to benefiting the most vulnerable. Case studies from across Asia, Africa, Latin America (Global South), and the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia (Global North) consider how the capability approach can contribute as a practical framework to achieving the SDGs’ ambitions for social, economic, political, and legal progress.
The chapter on "education and sustained poverty escapes in sub-Saharan Africa" authored by CPAN analyzes the interrelationship between education (SDG 4) and sustained poverty reduction (SDG 1). It draws attention to the role of education as an asset supporting resilience, as well as other factors that combine with education to contribute to capabilities that enable sustained escapes from poverty. To investigate this relationship, the chapter synthesizes mixed-methods research by CPAN in Tanzania, Rwanda, Niger, Malawi, Ethiopia, Uganda, and rural Kenya.
The chapter argues that a combination of multi-level factors supporting education has the transformative potential to convert into sustained escapes from poverty. Indeed, people construct strategies for escaping poverty using education as an instrumental asset, yet few achieve sustained escapes. To promote sustained escapes, there is a need for more and better-quality education certainly, but also for multi-level conversion factors that can contribute to education and wider wellbeing outcomes. These are policies that can be consciously directed as well as people’s own adaptive strategies, alongside processes of social change. Examples of factors that support education include labor market links, livelihood diversification, social networks, spousal collaboration, shifts in cultural and gender norms to support girls’ education, and an enabling policy context. This combination involving multiple conversion factors alongside education is argued to be ‘transformative’ in paving the way for sustained poverty escapes.
Empowered Worldviews: Assessing the persistence of psychosocial intervention effects in Zambia
Evidence on the persistence of psychosocial outcomes of interventions over the medium and long term, and in the face of shocks and stressors, is limited. We examined the extent to which empowerment associated with a psychosocial, faith-based approach, Empowered Worldview (EWV) persisted 3–5 years post-delivery of the intervention in Zambia among smallholder farmers. The EWV intervention in Zambia was delivered as part of THRIVE, an integrated livelihoods programme. We followed a previous study to disaggregate individual-level empowerment associated with EWV into three domains: internal (which relates to ‘power within’), localised (typically participation and access), and structural (e.g. institutional, environmental, and social structures).
To explore the persistence of EWV effects on empowerment, we used mixed methods and longitudinal data collected in 2020 and 2023, which were the midline and endline points of the THRIVE programme. Empirically, we used descriptive and regression analysis to compare internal and localised empowerment levels between the survey rounds (2020 and 2023) across study groups – including groups that received EWV before and after 2020 – and to the control group. We also re-interviewed a subset of EWV participants interviewed in 2020 to understand how empowerment has changed at the individual level over time.
Life history diagram for Beatrice.
The results show levels of internal empowerment associated with the EWV intervention persisted between the midline and endline surveys, especially when combined with THRIVE livelihood interventions. At the midline, 80.0 per cent of THRIVE with EWV participants were empowered, compared to 82.3 per cent at the endline. In contrast, 72.6 per cent and 73.07 per cent of the control sample participants were empowered at the midline and the endline, respectively. Quantitative results further show that localised empowerment significantly improved between survey rounds among participants who received EWV training and is positively associated with internal empowerment, consistent with literature that suggests localised enablers (supporting social environments) are crucial to sustaining internal empowerment. The qualitative data shows that persistent internal and localised empowerment was observed mostly among households in the non-poor wellbeing category, suggesting that additional interventions are needed to reach the poorest participants. Results also show internal and localised empowerment are positively associated with indicators of household resilience. We conclude the paper with recommendations for programming.
Life history diagram for Edward
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Zambia Poverty Dynamics Research
Front page of policy brief
The policy agenda proposed here builds on good measures already taken by the Government of Zambia in education, social protection, debt relief and macroeconomic management, and addresses the challenges that remain in creating a more prosperous and equal Zambia.
The rate of poverty reduction slowed in Zambia during the 2010s, and especially with the 2019 drought and policy responses to the pandemic. A high level of rural chronic poverty is associated with farming and other natural resource-based occupations, suggesting that natural resource management requires significant policy attention. Surprisingly, chronic poverty is highest in eastern and southern Zambia, despite the maize- and livestock-based economics in those regions.
In the context of continuing climate change, risks to natural resource-based occupations are increasing rapidly, which keeps people poor. Sustained escapes from poverty have not exceeded downward mobility into poverty. Urbanised provinces have typically done better than rural ones in reducing extreme poverty and deprivation.
Zambia’s debt servicing obligations and low economic growth have meant that public expenditure is constrained, though a little less in 2023 than in 2022 when reduced debt servicing allowed increased allocations to education and social protection budgets among others. Significantly greater public expenditure will be needed to recapture a higher rate of poverty reduction. However, it is also important that expenditure goes to items that will reach and benefit poor and vulnerable people.
This policy brief recommends a series measures, several of which are already underway, and within a sound macroeconomic management framework that has been put in place.
COVID-19 Life History Infographics: Zambia
Impacts of the Government of Zambia’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic on Poverty
COVID-19 tested the social welfare system that successive governments have been building in Zambia over the last two decades. Zambia had one of the highest poverty rates in the world going into the COVID-19 pandemic as well as overlapping vulnerabilities related to climate change, macroeconomic instability, and high external debt. These and other challenges exposed many people living above the poverty line to impoverishment and pushed households living in poverty further towards destitution.
Civil Society for Poverty Reduction (CSPR), the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN), and the Institute of Social and Economic Research (INESOR) have been monitoring the impacts of the pandemic on people living in or near poverty in Zambia since early 2021 in three districts – Lusaka, Kabwe and Chipata - about the reach and impact of these policies. This policy brief reviews the Government of Zambia’s key policies to mitigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on people living in or near poverty and summarises insights from people affected by these policies about what they have achieved and how they can be improved.
Poverty, Hunger and Jobs: Pandemic Update and Recovery Prospects
The COVID-19 pandemic and intersecting crises— including climate change, conflict, debt, and the ‘triple F’ crisis (food, fuel, finance)— have reversed progress on a range of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), increasing the number of people in poverty, contributing to a dramatic rise in hunger and food insecurity, increasing gender inequalities, and constraining the effectiveness of interventions to promote pro-poor livelihoods and decent jobs.
In many countries, the post-COVID-19 recovery has been slow and incomplete. To promote the joining up of SDGs (1- no poverty, 2- zero hunger, 8- decent work and economic growth), CPAN/IDS, IFPRI, Southern Voice, and the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development co-convened a three-day virtual international workshop in June 2023 on “poverty, hunger and jobs”. Its aim was to synthesise latest knowledge and data about the effects and the effectiveness of policy responses on these issues, and to work out its policy/programming implications to re-establish positive development progress on hunger, jobs and poverty.
This brief outlines key takeaways and recommendations from the workshop presentations and discussions.
Chronic Poverty Report 2023: Pandemic Poverty
The Chronic Poverty Report 2023: Pandemic Poverty sets out to investigate the highly negative effects of the Covid-19 restrictions, and most importantly, the success or otherwise of the measures pursued to mitigate those effects on people in and near poverty.
Read MoreThe Role of Local Resources in Mitigating the Impact of Covid-19
Governments often found it challenging to mitigate the negative socioeconomic impacts of Covid-19 for households in and near poverty. Local efforts were critical to supplement government measures and implement government guidelines.
In Ethiopia, these efforts mobilised a pre-existing, government supported village network system. In Bangladesh, a network of formal and informal strategies played an important role in increasing assistance to people affected by the pandemic, including through industry-based corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives.
This policy brief outlines local responses to and lessons learnt from mitigating the negative socioeconomic impacts of Covid-19.
Delegating Authority in Bangladesh to Manage the Covid-19 Pandemic
Bangladesh, like most countries, grappled with the harsh conditions of Covid-19, with little infrastructure and set up of institutions to deal with the consequences of the pandemic.
A country with a large informal economy, and an even larger export manufacturing sector it is highly dependent on, the Bangladesh government had tough decisions to make when it came to saving and protecting the lives of millions, as well as ensuring continued economic activity to save livelihoods.
To strike a balance between protecting both these important factors, the central government adopted a unique approach of mobilising and enabling the local government to implement a lot of measures. Their approach was area centric, in that the local government recognised the needs of their districts, and that looked different for different areas of the country, whether rural or urban, agricultural or industrial focused.
This policy brief outlines some of the local measures and responses that worked in minimising the impact of Covid-19 on the dense Bangladeshi population.
Mitigating Learning Disruption During Covid-19: Evidence from India
Long school closures in India during the pandemic caused significant learning disruption, with particularly adverse consequences for marginalised girls and boys.
Data from large-scale representative surveys does not show a massive fall in enrolment because of the closures. However, low levels of basic reading and maths skills among school-age children are concerning. In response, various centrally managed interventions took place during the pandemic (e.g. to encourage enrolment, including through social protection).
Schools also undertook measures with a more direct bearing on children’s learning. Continued efforts are needed to reach severely disadvantaged children who are not enrolled.
Migrants’ Vulnerabilities in India During the Pandemic
Migration promotes agglomeration of economic activity in more productive locations and improves employment opportunities for households in less developed regions, alleviating poverty and boosting shared prosperity through remittances.
Most internal migrants’ livelihoods are characterised by circular mobility, mandatory physical presence at work, temporary or seasonal nature of work, and informality. Beside their temporary residential status and lack of access to government welfare schemes, most migrants are vulnerable workers.
The Covid-19 pandemic made them more vulnerable due to its mobility restrictions and total shutdown of the economy during lockdown. The extent of precarity migrants faced depended on existing policies, and how agile policymakers were in responding to the crisis and introducing new policies to protect vulnerable migrants.
Lessons on South Africa’s Social Protection Response to Covid-19
South Africa stands out for its social protection response to Covid-19, especially regarding the expansion of programmes, number of beneficiaries and benefit amount.
At the height of the pandemic, the government introduced the emergency Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant was introduced for over 10 million unemployed adults and informal workers through a digitised system.
Despite successes in expanding the grant system, digitisation of the system presented challenges and led to exclusion errors. An alternative to the country’s school feeding scheme, the National School Nutrition Programme which regularly fed around 10 million children, could not be found.
Responding to Polycrisis in Ethiopia and Kenya
The spread of Covid-19 was layered on to various intersecting crises (‘polycrisis’), worsening people’s lives and weakening governments’ responses to the pandemic. Many responses to multiple crises focus on single hazards.
This brief highlights effective responses to Covid-19, drought and conflict from Kenya and Ethiopia, which may offer lessons for future policy and programming that equitably address multiple crises.
It focuses on two examples of how governments and local actors have sought to strengthen people’s ability to cope with multiple crises: through collaboration at different levels of governance across sectors; and strengthening resilience through water management.
Measures to Mitigate Pandemic Restrictions
Policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in the global South were dominated by movement restrictions and lockdowns imposed in the global North, and not always relevant to the countries or geographical areas where they were imposed.
Countries must be free to decide how to manage a global crisis, so their governments can take decisions that are in the best interests of their citizens, with specific reference to the poorest people, whose lives are already challenging. Many countries’ political and public finance systems could not support mitigating measures to compensate the effects of the lockdowns and restrictions.
Such measures rarely made up for the job losses, income reduction and erosion of social capital caused by closing economies. They also rarely reached some of the groups most affected – including those in the urban informal economy, poor migrants and poor women.
The Pandemic, Informality and Poverty: Rethinking Economic Policy Responses to the Informal Economy
Informal workers, who represent over 60 per cent of all workers globally, were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic restrictions and recession.
The pandemic exposed the pre-existing disadvantages that informal workers face as well as the essential goods and services they provide.
To reduce poverty and inequality going forward, it is important to build on this new-found recognition of the contributions of informal workers and promote an enabling policy and regulatory environment towards them.