Reaching the poor: We can do better

MS Uganda and her partners are not doing too badly when it comes to reaching the poor. But that should not stop us from trying to do even better. We should step up efforts to involve poor people in our development activities.

This is the conclusion after country office staff and the MS Travelling Topic Team (TTT) on Poverty visited MS Uganda and four partner organisations in Hoima and Masindi. The team consists of one person from MS’ International Department and two programme officers from Zimbabwe and Nepal respectively. It assists country programs to improve their focus on poverty in terms of definitions, causes, target groups, priorities, activities etc.

During the visits members of the partner organisations and their local communities were asked to rank their level of well being and poverty. Are they very poor, neither poor nor rich or are they well off?

The answers showed that most of the members and beneficiaries are somewhere in the middle – neither among the poorest nor among the most well off. However, MS Uganda encourages her partners to review and increase their efforts to reach the poor.

We need to be even more aware of targeting the poor when mobilising members and planning activities. And we need to deliberately focus on our capability of reaching the poor when we monitor our activities and write our reports.

As a starting point, MS Uganda has decided to create time during partner visits for country office and partner staff to discuss how we can do better when it comes to eradicating poverty. (kp)

Wealth ranking tool

Wealth ranking is one of the techniques used by the MS’ Travelling Topic Team on poverty. You may also use it in your quest to find out if your organisation reaches the poor.

The team simply asks people in the communities how they define poverty and then to categorise the people within the communities in different levels of wealth.

In Masindi, members of Budongo United Women’s Association and Gukwatamanzi Farmers Association defined people within their communities to belong to one of the following three levels of wealth – the majority being placed in the medium level:

High level – people with a steady income, live in a solid house, own a car or a motorcycle, have access to pure water and electricity, can send their children to a good school, eat at least three meals a day and have assets like property and land

Medium level – people with irregular income, live in a semi-solid house (maybe a grass thatched hut), have an outdoor pit latrine, own a few life stock like cows and goats, eat one or two meals a day and can afford to send their children to a decent school

Low level – people with no or very poor income, have no or very poor houses, eat one meal a day, cannot send their children to school and have no assets or property.