By: - Amro Maad Yekreb H. AL-Hamdani
The Poverty in Yemen
The Republic of Yemen is one of the driest, poorest and least developed countries in the world. It ranks 150 out of 177 countries on the UNDP Human Development Index (2006). An estimated 42 percent of the people are poor, and one Yemeni in five is malnourished. Poverty is endemic, particularly in more remote and less accessible areas.
About two thirds of the population, including 80 percent of the country’s poor people, live in rural areas and most of them depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Agriculture is a vital economic sector, providing jobs and income in a country with an unemployment rate of 37 percent and averting migration to urban areas. But the country’s poor natural resource base cannot meet the needs of a population that is increasing by more than 3 percent annually. Yemen has the world’s fourth fastest growing population, according to a recent UNICEF report. People in rural areas are poor because they do not have adequate access to basic necessities such as land, safe water, health care and education. In Yemen the ownership and exploitation of strategic resources such as land and water are controlled by the stronger, more influential sectors of society.
Lack of water is a crucial issue. The government estimates that each Yemeni’s average share of renewable water resources is 125 cubic metres per year. This is one tenth of the average in most Middle Eastern countries and one fiftieth of the world average. And as the population grows, that share shrinks.
Agriculture uses more than 90 per cent of the country’s scarce water supplies, leaving little for household consumption and sanitation. Only 0.7 percent of rural people have access to sanitation services. The lack of clean water has a negative impact on health and contributes to a high rate of child mortality.
For rural women, collecting water for the household is one of the heavier burdens in a disproportionately large work load. In highland and mountain areas women and girls typically spend up to seven hours a day collecting water. As a result, girls are deprived of an opportunity for education.
Despite significant economic and political strides made since unification in 1990 and the 1994 civil war, Yemen remains to a great extent a conservative tribal society. Fundamental social, cultural and religious constraints affect efforts to improve women’s status and condition.
Who are Yemen’s poor people?
The country’s poor people are mainly small-scale farmers and sharecroppers, landless people, nomadic herders and artisanal fishers. Women are the most vulnerable members of all groups.
Where are they?
Poverty is more common in the highlands, the semi-desert in the east and north-east, in the sand dune strip and inter-wadi areas of the central Tihama plain, and in fishing villages on the Arabian Sea . Most of the country’s rural poor people are concentrated in the six governorates of Sana’a, Taiz, Ibb, Hodeida, Dahmar and Hadramwt, which also have the largest share of the total population. The distribution of land and water resources in these governorates is highly inequitable.
Why are they poor?
Poverty in rural areas is a result of the lack of access to basic resources such as land and water and to services such as health care and education. Isolation makes it even more difficult for poor people to gain access to resources and services. In the country’s more remote regions, rural poor people are physically, intellectually, economically, and socially isolated from the rest of the nation.
Rural infrastructure is inadequate. Only 15 percent of the rural population is covered by the national electric grid. The national road network is poorly maintained. Yemen has more than 60,000 km of dirt tracks and trails, most of them suitable only for powerful four-wheel drive vehicles. Transport is costly and time-consuming. This adds to the cost of goods, obstructs efficient administration and restricts social and economic opportunities.
The massive return of migrant workers as a result of the Gulf Crisis left many rural households without remittance income and prospects for employment.
The plans which the country of do opposition poverty
T |
|
A comprehensive structural adjustment programme has brought down government deficits and inflation, but growth has not kept pace with the population and has had little impact on poverty. Public employment can no longer be used as a cushion against poverty, and the private sector has not grown fast enough to provide jobs.
The National Committee for the Social Safety Net, chaired by the prime minister, deals with the adverse effects of economic reform and coordinates anti-poverty efforts. The Ministry of State for Cabinet Affairs runs the committee’s secretariat, but so far the committee has met only twice and the secretariat needs more capacity to manage activities. The Ministry of Insurance and Social Affairs might be more suitable for running the secretariat, but this arrangement would tend to identify poverty as only a social issue.
Duplicating Poverty Programmes
The National Committee for the Social Safety Net has responsibility for four major national programmes:
· The $50 million Social Welfare Fund, run by the government.
· The $86 million Social Fund for Development, funded by the World Bank and other donors.
· The $88 million Public Works Project, funded by both the government and the World Bank.
· The $43 million Poverty Alleviation and Employment Generation Programme, supported by UNDP, the United Nations Capital Development Fund and the World Food Programme.
The government’s Social Welfare Fund, managed by the Ministry of Insurance and Social Affairs, focuses on directing cash transfers to needy families, but is shifting towards a development orientation rather than a welfare approach.
Negative the plan
One problem with the different steering committees and boards is that they duplicate many of the functions of line ministries, whose capacities are not being built as part of the process. Moreover, the multiplicity of structures stretches the capacity of the government to provide coordination.
Another drawback is that the poverty reduction efforts are not organized in a well-defined development framework. In 1995 the First Five-Year Plan for a united Yemen hardly mentioned poverty, and the plan’s implementation appears to have been overtaken by the demands of the structural adjustment programme.
The Pros and Cons of Decentralization
Targeting could be improved if government were more decentralized and civil society organizations more active. The number of civil society organizations has been growing, but most are still in the main cities. Yemen’s experience with decentralized development dates to its local development associations of the late 1960s, which mobilized most of their resources from local communities to build schools and health clinics.
Since 1991 the governorates have had some autonomy for developing infrastructure and providing public services, but decentralization reforms have been limited. The election of mayors, local council members and other representatives has not yet been approved. Governors continue to be appointed by the president. The fear is that decentralization carried out too quickly and radically will strengthen tribalism and threaten the new, hard-won unity.
UNDP has been supporting more decentralized development through its assistance to the government’s Regional Development Programme, being piloted in five governorates. Modeled on the Area Development Schemes in Sudan, the programme emphasizes community self-reliance rather than simple micro credit or technical assistance. This involves thorough discussions with participants at the start of the project to mobilize their support for building organizations at three different levels: small micro credit groups of three to five households, community associations of about a dozen micro credit groups, and area development schemes formed by several community associations.
Because the approach emphasizes the beneficiaries’ self-organization, it can take time to bear results. But communities learn to take control of local development and come together to influence regional decision-making.
Most of UNDP’s poverty reduction support is for capacity building, especially for the National Committee for the Social Safety Net. The aim is to foster greater national ownership and control of poverty programmes, by not creating organizations parallel to the government structure. UNDP also encourages a more comprehensive approach - beyond merely providing people with welfare or public sector jobs, as in past practice. The results of the new approach could be slow in coming and are unlikely to be easily measurable.
women and poverty
نسبة الأسر في خط الفقر الأدنى بحسب نوع رب الأسرة والمحافظة Percentage of household by minimum poverty line and gender of householder and governorate
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
To untie unfasten undo
1. Alter president’s
2. Alter the government
3. Correction the justice…..etc.
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق