Feature/Redefining poverty in Kenya’s fishing villages

Palm trees sway overhead in the hot midday sun. Clotheslines stretch from house to house. The garments add more colour to the tropical blues and greens. Houses built with mud walls, mangrove poles, and palm-thatched roofs dot the landscape. In coastal Kenyan villages, these houses are a common sight.

By many standards, the construction of these houses indicates that the inhabitants are poor, and around half of the people living here sometimes have only sufficient food for one meal a day. However, a majority of these households actually has an income that is more than the World Bank’s international poverty line of US$1.90 per person per day. But what if the household earns an income above the poverty line, yet does not have access to a small amount of money in times of need, or frequently misses meals? What then does measuring poverty by the dollar mean?

Many international organisations measure poverty in terms of income, and along Kenya’s coast earning a low income is one part of the poverty story. But the people in these communities might measure whether their homes have brick walls or mud walls, or an iron sheet roof that collects valuable rainwater – or a cheaper, palm-thatched roof.

Having money does not always translate to being “not poor”. That’s one key lesson from households with members who earn above the poverty line but still live in a basic house and lack sanitation and food. In Kenya, people who fish embody the conundrum of having money but being poor.

In the village of Mkwero, one of the sites where SPACES conducted community surveys, thatched and metal roofs indicate different levels of income or household strategies. Photo courtesy of SPACES.

Who is poor?

Understanding poverty in its different forms is the first step towards alleviating it. Since September 2013, researchers at the Sustainable Poverty Alleviation from Coastal Ecosystem Services (SPACES) project have been exploring how different forms of poverty are connected to ecosystems. They studied environmental contributions to well-being and poverty alleviation in coastal communities in Kenya and Mozambique.

For one part of the SPACES project in Kenya, the team surveyed 1,638 households in four communities. They then analysed whether each household experienced four different types of poverty: low income, dissatisfaction with life, lacking in basic human needs, and having a low material style of life (lacking property and assets). These four aspects would allow the researchers to paint a more nuanced picture of different types of poverty in the region.

The survey showed that a little over 80% of households in coastal Kenya were property poor, about 20% were income poor, and 20% were not able to meet their basic needs, with little overlap between the groups. In other words, “poor” households are not equally poor across different dimensions of poverty. Tim Daw, the principle investigator of SPACES and a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, says “who is identified as poor depends upon what we measure. … The people who are poor in one dimension of poverty aren’t necessarily the same people who are poor in other dimensions”.

When it comes to policy-making, “too often, people tend to focus on income and income only”, says Sara Fröcklin, a tropical fisheries researcher who is a senior policy advisor for the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation. She says that other dimensions of poverty such as physical, human, and social resources should be included as well. That might mean considering power structures, social networks, and people’s opportunities, or what people mean by acceptable houses and transportation, or how they value education and health. “If you don’t have access to these other resources, and the power to make strategic life decisions and act upon them, income doesn’t always make a big difference [to] your situation and life satisfaction.”

“… who is identified as poor depends upon what we measure”.

–Tim Daw, Stockholm Resilience Centre, SPACES

The SPACES study revealed an additional twist: when the researchers zoomed in on fishers, they found that fishing households were less likely than their neighbours to be in income poverty. However, fishers were more likely than non-fishers to be unsatisfied with their lives, to lack access to basic sanitation, and to live in poorer quality houses, made of mud, mangrove poles, or palm-thatched roofs.

In Kenya, households that earned a livelihood from something other than fishing were more often satisfied, less likely to skip meals, and lived in what might be considered a better standard of house, with brick walls and an iron sheet roof. But they were more often found to be income poor.

A closer look into the communities

These results raised interesting questions about the dynamics of spending, sharing, and saving income that were not covered by the data SPACES researchers could collect. However, the researchers’ discussions of the results with community members and field teams suggested that the explanation might be in the culture and spending habits of fishers, and their tendency to spend rather than invest income in assets like their homes.

This past spring, SPACES researchers confirmed their observations in conversations with the communities at the four sites in Kenya, including the Mkwiro village and Vanga village, where they collected data in 2014. Fishers and non-fishers live in all four sites. The researchers discussed their findings on poverty with community members in formal dialogues, presenting the research findings and exploring solutions – and giving community members a chance to present what they see as the reasons behind the patterns in the data.

Four villages in Kenya participated in community surveys and dialogues with SPACES. Illustration: E. Wikander/Azote.

Jane Nyanapah, a community development specialist at the Wildlife Conservation Society and lead of the SPACES community dialogues in Kenya, says that fishers and non-fishers alike said they want to improve their houses, but transporting materials to the rural sites is difficult, which is one reason rural community members live in more basic houses. In the urban sites, houses are more often constructed with an iron sheet roof and brick walls because people can find the materials more easily.

A man from Vanga village, a rural site, said that availability and speed are key: “When you decide to use mangrove poles, you can start constructing the house today and in one week you will have the house to sleep in. But for the brick house, it will be close to two years before you can sleep in it and that is why many people use mangrove poles for constructing [their houses]”.

Both fishers and non-fishers prefer an iron sheet roof to a thatched roof. Iron sheet roofs collect rainwater. In Mkwiro village, where many houses have iron sheet roofs, that makes them especially important, as the community does not have access to a well. Beyond meeting immediate water needs, Nyanapah adds that roofs are also status symbols, showing who has money in the communities.

Fishing in these communities is one of the more lucrative jobs available, and most fishers tend to be men. Women do not have opportunities to engage in fishing for a number of reasons, says Chris Cheupe, a qualitative data collector for SPACES. Childcare responsibilities, for example, mean that women don’t have time to fish. Plus, fishing is seen as a taboo activity for women.

Cheupe says women take on multiple smaller jobs, like frying and selling small fish and collecting firewood and shells to sell or use. Men and women in the communities control their own money, but women earn far less than men. He notes that women tend to spend their money on their children’s education, household items, and clothes.

Fishers – mostly men – might spend their money on the social amenities available to them, often alcohol or miraa (khat), a light legal stimulant. Nyanapah thinks that if they had other options, they would spend money differently, an opinion echoed in community dialogues.

Many of the community members – not just fishers – said they wanted to change their current livelihood strategies from not saving to saving and investing their money.¹ 1. Bowles, S., Durlauf, S. N., Hoff, K. (eds.), 2006. Poverty Traps. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 256 pp. E-book ISBN: 9781400841295 Website See all references  Of all the respondents interviewed during the community dialogues, 95% said they were willing to reinvest their savings.

Some of them said they could not save because their income is only enough to cover their basic needs. Others said it would be possible for them to save if there was a place to keep their money to “avoid the temptation to use it” – a phrase repeated in the focus groups. But their communities do not have any banks. For Vanga, the closest bank is located in Ukunda town, about 75 km (45 miles) away.

When fishers were specifically asked why they do not save and reinvest, one man said, “fishing is unpredictable. You can get 1,000 Kenyan shillings [about US$10 or £7.50] today and nothing tomorrow, so [you] end up using the little that was saved.”

On the last day of the three-day community dialogues at each site, a theatre performance reflected the SPACES findings for the community members, presenting back to the people what they had responded in the surveys. The Matuga Arts Troupe, a community-based organisation, explained the concept of poverty dimensions and reiterated how the community felt about the importance of savings.

Community theater presentations were part of the dialogues held by SPACES to explore the project’s findings and introduce the results to participants. Photo: Joaquim Mwaganda/SPACES.

The SPACES team has shared the communities’ suggestions in one-to-one meetings with 16 stakeholders in Kenya, including the Kenya Fisheries Service, the Red Cross, and the Coast Development Authority. The “hope is that the dialogues and discussions with various [stakeholders] can help change the structures that make savings behaviour so difficult”, says Daw. The SPACES team will have follow-up meetings with the stakeholders in November and December. During this time, the team will also share a newly developed data exploration tool with the aim of inspiring and empowering decision makers and donor agencies to explore the potential impacts of interventions by investigating the status of poverty and well-being and the connections to specific ecosystem services.

Working environments

The spending and saving behaviour of fishers is embedded in a larger equation: the value of the ecosystem services, or the natural resources that support them in their daily lives. While such ecosystem services – for example, having fish to sell – bring fishers out of income poverty, they may not lift them out of poverty in terms of their property or help them meet their sanitation and food needs.

In this case, the coastal environment provides fish for people to harvest; they sell it to fish traders, who sell it at a market. The fishers earn a relatively decent wage and most of them make more than $1.90 a day. But this money does not last long. Fishing income can be variable, almost like winning a lottery, which makes it difficult to plan and save for the future. And when money does come, fishers frequently do not have the means to save or invest in their homes but rather are tempted to spend it directly.

The SPACES results suggest that trying to increase the income of fishers might not be the most effective way to alleviate poverty. Typical fisheries development interventions include providing more advanced gear or methods to catch more fish. Such interventions may increase income in the short term but might also have the side effect of depleting fish populations faster, resulting in a reinforcing cycle of poverty and degradation. They also have other unintended consequences, Fröcklin says, citing a World Bank gear exchange program where gear goes unused because it is unfamiliar to the fishers or unusable in their fishing areas. The provision of these resources can also cause conflicts within the community, as some get help and others don’t, she says.

“I would much rather see decision makers focusing on building knowledge [to fill] gaps or creating awareness instead of just providing new fishing gears as a solution to the problem”, Fröcklin says. “It is important to consider cultural aspects and power relations within a community.”

SPACES shows that, hypothetically, having more fish to sell would result in more money but if fishers do not save or invest that money in their families, there is no impact on alleviating poverty. The reality is that the fishers already have money from their current levels of fishing effort, but they do not have many options available to them. They cannot invest in their homes because they do not have access to building materials. They cannot save their money because they do not have access to banks.

A SPACES community dialogue held earlier this year. Photo: Joaquim Mwaganda/SPACES.

The community members said it themselves: they would like to save, but the infrastructure is not available to them. Instead of providing gear, communities suggested that societal services – such as setting up banks in poor communities and financial literacy training – might help more people out of poverty than increasing their fish catches would, and with little impact on the already overexploited ecosystems.

Poverty in practice

For policy and decision makers, broadening the definition of poverty beyond a dollar amount is a key to understanding poverty. And understanding poverty is the first step towards alleviating it.

Fröcklin argues that policy makers and governments should look at other dimensions of poverty beyond income because income does not speak to what people can do, or how they can improve their own situation.

Björn Schulte-Herbrüggen, a SPACES researcher, agrees. “It’s absolutely crucial to say what aspect of poverty you are talking about” when planning interventions and programs to alleviate poverty. For example, depending on which measure of poverty is used, who is considered to be in the poorest group will change. That means that interventions must be targeted to the type of poverty they are meant to fix – and to unexpected groups that may not seem to be poor at first glance. Schulte-Herbrüggen says the first question to ask is, what kind of poverty are people in?