Poverty Reduction Needs Assessment in Urban Communities

Introduction: Poverty in Wilson County

Many countries around the world have made poverty reduction a policy priority by adopting the goals of the Millennium Declaration or similar objectives. The Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) Program enables analysts to examine income and poverty trends in individual counties such as Wilson County, North Carolina. The application of the SAIPE Program in the State of North Carolina in 2012 revealed that, despite several major poverty-reduction plans being implemented, overall poverty rates remained relatively high. Wilson County, NC, has a population in which approximately 18.5% of residents — representing around 13,747 people — and 13% of families live below the federal poverty line, making it the second-poorest county in the state.

These poverty rates are particularly troubling given several attempts to alleviate poverty through programs such as the Work First Cash Assistance Program, the North Carolina Weatherization Program, and the Individual Development Account (IDA) Program, run jointly by the county Department of Social Services and the Community Improvement Association (WCIA). One of the primary reasons these programs have failed to reduce poverty rates is that they are not consistent with the actual needs of the community. An accurate needs assessment that considers multiple perspectives and specific objectives must therefore be developed in order to design a more effective policy intervention — one that helps the county reduce its poverty rate and comply with the objectives of the Millennium Declaration. This analysis provides both qualitative and quantitative methods for designing a more accurate intervention.

Data Collection Methods

Societies do not occur naturally; rather, they form through the people and institutions that work to shape them. The constructivist approach requires a foundation of knowledge that can be used for interpretive research. These foundations can be built upon qualitative approaches, quantitative approaches, or some combination of each. Both approaches carry distinct advantages and disadvantages. For example, qualitative analysis can introduce a significant degree of subjectivity in the recording of data. Quantitative approaches, on the other hand, offer less possibility of bias but may also miss rich contextual data that a purely statistical method cannot capture. An interpretivist approach, by contrast, can allow individuals to provide an evaluation of their own experience — insight that could not be gained through numbers alone.

Collecting data for a poverty reduction needs analysis undoubtedly requires combining both quantitative and qualitative approaches. There are numerous economic and social metrics that can provide valuable information about the current state of Wilson County. These might include education levels and opportunities, individual and family incomes, internet access density, aggregate economic data, job availability, and many other meaningful indicators. Interviews with residents and community leaders could provide insights that traditional metrics cannot capture. The opinions of individuals about the local culture and barriers to escaping poverty could align resulting policies with ground-level realities in ways that a purely quantitative approach cannot achieve.

Literature Review

Reducing poverty has been a stated priority of politicians across the developed world. However, the rhetoric is usually accompanied by policy proposals to increase the minimum wage, expand child tax credits, strengthen the Earned Income Tax Credit, extend Unemployment Insurance, fund government child care, and create "Green Jobs" — programs that many argue are inefficient vehicles for alleviating poverty (Besharov & Call, 2009). Some believe that income transfers are effective in targeting poverty and reducing inequality, while some studies have indicated that welfare reform had no strong differential effect on moving the privately poor out of poverty (Bollinger & Hagstrom, 2011).

Others lean more toward the development of human capital as a long-term solution and challenge the notion that good governance alone leads to poverty reduction. They point to education, training, and skill development as the primary tools for alleviating poverty. However, the effect that poverty itself has on academic outcomes has been extensively studied. While many look to education to break the cycle of poverty, they often ignore the role that poverty plays in shaping educational outcomes (Pedro, 2011). Rather than addressing poverty as an obstacle to learning, many politicians blame poor teachers or other institutional problems without directly confronting the underlying economic conditions.

After more than a decade of work, the first target of Goal 1 of the Millennium Development Goals — to halve the proportion of the world's poor by 2015 — was expected to be achieved on a global scale. However, much of that progress is directly attributable to China, while regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia have not made comparable gains (Kwon & Kim, 2014). It can therefore be argued that, despite policy efforts at an international scale, most interventions have failed to produce the desired outcomes. It has been further argued that the one-size-fits-all approach to poverty reduction may be a useful buzzword for politicians but offers little of the localization needed to construct effective interventions (Cornwall & Brock, 2006).

In the United States, disparities in income equality must also account for cultural factors, not simply economic ones. Problems of poverty, poor health, and incarceration are unevenly distributed among racial and ethnic minorities in the United States (Nikansah-Amankra, Abvanu, & Miller, 2013). The challenges of diversity in poverty reduction are multi-faceted and difficult to fully understand. Racial and ethnic minorities, women, youth, and the elderly all face specific obstacles to economic advancement. The role of race, age, and gender adds a layer of complexity to any comprehensive needs assessment.

Conclusion and Recommendations

In any community, there may be a wide range of perspectives regarding how individuals understand the problem of poverty and what causes contribute to it. It is important that each respondent's position within the community is understood in order to help frame their perspective appropriately. Social and political factors can play a significant role in shaping respondents' views and should be carefully balanced to identify opportunities for designing effective programs and services. Every effort must be made to obtain recommendations from as many different cultural and social groups as possible to ensure that the community is fully and equitably represented in the final assessment.

Ultimately, a comprehensive poverty reduction strategy for Wilson County must move beyond existing one-size-fits-all programs and embrace a localized, multi-disciplinary framework that centers community voices alongside rigorous data. Only by aligning policy design with the lived experiences of residents can Wilson County hope to make meaningful and lasting progress against poverty.

References

Besharov, D., & Call, D. (2009). Income transfers alone won't eradicate poverty. The Policy Studies Journal, 599–631.

Bollinger, C., & Hagstrom, P. (2011). The poverty reduction success of public transfers for working age immigrants and refugees in the United States. Contemporary Economic Policy, 191–206.

Cornwall, A., & Brock, K. (2006). What do buzzwords do for development policy? A critical look at 'participation', 'empowerment' and 'poverty reduction'. Third World Quarterly, 1043–1060.

DeClerck, F. (2012). Integrating ecology and poverty reduction: Ecological dimensions. Springer Science & Business Media.

Kwon, H., & Kim, E. (2014). Poverty reduction and good governance: Examining the rationale of the Millennium Development Goals. Development and Change, 353–375.

May, J., & Diga, K. (2015). Progress towards resolving the measurement link between ICT and poverty reduction. Impact of Information Society Research in the Global South, 83–104.

Nikansah-Amankra, S., Abvanu, S., & Miller, R. (2013). Disparities in health, poverty, incarceration, and social justice among racial groups in the United States. The Political Contexts of Inequalities, 217–240.

Pedro, N. (2011). A broader and bolder approach uses education to break the cycle of poverty: Making bold assertions that all children can achieve while doing nothing to address the challenges they face is neither fair nor sound public policy. Phi Delta Kappan.

Vechakul, J., & Agogino, A. (2013). A comparison of two transdisciplinary human-centered design approaches for poverty alleviation. Retrieved from Berkeley: