Use of extension services

Poverty incidence and poverty profiling 54 6 Poverty incidence and poverty profiling SUMMARY. The Cost of Basic Needs estimate of poverty reveals that 36 percent of the Afghan population is not able to meet their basic needs. The incidence of poverty is very unevenly distributed and pockets with very high poverty rates are found among the Kuchi population 54 percent and in South, West-Central and East regions of the country more than 44 percent. Poverty among the Kuchi’s is not only more widespread, poor Kuchi’s are also signiicantly poorer than the rural and urban poor. Although the national Gini index of 29 is low in international perspective, substantial inequality exists in shares of consumption: whereas the richest quintile of the population has a share of 39 percent of total consumption, the poorest quintile has only 9 percent. Noticeably, the average consumption level of the second – non-poor – quintile is only little above the poverty threshold of 1,255 Afs, suggesting that a signiicant proportion of these are vulnerable to falling under the poverty line. Average per-capita monthly consumption expenditure of poor Afghans is only 950 Afs, but the corresponding igure for the non-poor is still less than 2,100 Afs. Poverty incidence is signiicantly associated with household size and number of children in the household. It is likely that high fertility is an important contributing factor to poverty in Afghan households. Also various characteristics of the head of household and of household members are correlated with poverty. This is particularly the case for the sex of the household head, and the head’s educational attainment, employment status and industry of work. Child labour and seasonal migration are coping strategies that seem particularly to be employed by poor households, and net primary and secondary enrolment of poor children 50 and 13 percent, respectively is lower or substantially lower than that of non-poor children respectively, 53 and 18 percent. Access to land is also importantly related to poverty: whereas 26 percent of land-owning households are poor, this is the case for no less than 42 percent of households that cultivate land on the basis of renting, sharecropping or mortgaging arrangements. Finally, the face of poverty is revealed in poor access to basic services like safe drinking water, improved sanitation and electricity.

6.1 Introduction

The measurement of poverty, its geographic distribution, its evolution in time and its relation to key demographic and socio-economic variables are critical to understand the causes and consequences of material deprivation, design effective poverty reduction policies – such as the Afghanistan National Development Strategy ANDS – and monitor the progress towards higher levels of material well-being. Poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon and accordingly there is a wide variety of approaches to its measurement. Conventionally poverty has been defined in terms of income or expenditure based on the assumption that persons’ material standard of living largely reflects their well-being. The poor are then identified as those with a material standard of living below a certain level. The analysis in this chapter follows the method advocated by the World Bank and is based on the so called Cost of Basic Needs CBN approach. This chapter begins with a brief description of the main poverty measures applied in the present poverty analysis of Afghanistan Section 6.2. Further details, technical backgrounds and assumptions are described in detail in Annex V. Section 6.3 provides the general poverty estimation and its temporal and spatial distribution, and the subsequent section elaborates on the issue of inequality in the country. Section 6.5 explores several correlations with other development indicators, such as employment, disability, literacy and access to land. This analysis offers a more in-depth profile of the poor in Afghanistan and the possible sources of vulnerability. The findings presented in these sections can inform policy makers and programme designers about the appropriate interventions for poverty reduction and development.