Robert Miller, Mary Mathenge, Kate Bird, Francis Z. Karin, Raphael Gitau and Esther Kaloi Nteza (2011). Chronic Poverty Research Centre, Working Paper, No. 219, July.

Using minimally-structured interviews with several generations of Kenyan families, the paper finds that family-history interviews lead to a more nuanced understanding about the factors that support movement  out of poverty and shows that ascent out of poverty is a process rather than something arising due to chains of discrete events.

The literature on poverty studies, particularly those that focus on understanding the factors that support households’ exit from poverty, show that endowments such as education, self-confidence, diversification of livelihood sources, formal employment, migration, accumulation of assets, the kind of economic growth pursued, government interventions, access to credit, social protection etc., can be important factors in facilitating escape from poverty. At the same time, it is usually recognised “that the processes which lead individuals and households to escape from poverty are diverse and context-specific”. Studies also show that the movement out of poverty need not be a linear process but can be interrupted by negative events. Escape from poverty therefore usually generates a “‘saw-tooth’ pattern of gradual rises punctuated by abrupt drops” due to predictable and unpredictable negative events.

In this paper, Miller et al use qualitative method, specifically family-history of households in two districts of Kenya, to understand “the complex interplay of mechanisms that can lead to” ascent out of poverty. They argue that while quantitative poverty studies using longitudinal panel data, by “establishing sequence”, can provide “convincing causal links between events”, it does not help in understanding why the same factors do not necessarily work the same way in different contexts. The advantage of using qualitative family-histories is that it “has the capacity to provide insights into the contingent nature of leaving poverty”.

For the family-history interviews, the households that had exited poverty were identified using household level panel data collected at four points of time (1997, 2000, 2004 and 2007) under the Tegemeo Agricultural Policy and Research Analysis programme. Family-history interviews with the family members across different generations and of both genders, of a small sub-set of poverty escaper households, were conducted in 2008 and 2010.

The main results of the study show that in the context of the Kenyan economy, there are five main routes for ascending out of poverty. The first route identified relates to the extra earnings from cash crops that can help households gradually accumulate resources and exit from poverty. In this context, the authors note that the access to or possession of sufficient quantity of land, over and above the minimum needed for subsistence, is critical for generating extra income. At the same time, a number of other factors (markets, road networks, remunerative prices) are equally necessary to ensure sustained generation of extra income. Indeed, the family-history of a tea-growing family shows that, possession of a small, independent tea-growing farm, helped the family generate additional, stable income. This was possible because the better quality tea leaves produced by the small farm commanded a higher price and the larger tea plantations in the area, who bought the higher quality leaves from the small farm, provided a stable, reliable market outlet. On the other hand, those growing coffee, saw their earnings dwindle with the coffee cooperatives closing down and crash of coffee prices in the market.

Off-farm work constitutes the second route of ascending out of poverty. The different kinds of off-farm work that the households got into are: working as agricultural labour; running a small local shop or a small business, migration etc. The third route - the role of education in facilitating movement out of poverty – however, is not very clear-cut. The authors argue that rather than formal academic qualification, it is skills training that are found to be more fundamental in helping to provide employment and hence exiting from poverty.

The fourth route to exit poverty is provided by the informal support system such as the support from the extended family and informal support mechanisms. These help in accessing financial assets which can be used for “paying for children’s school fees, house improvements, investments in farm or other business activities, etc.” Other than family members with resources to provide help, rotational savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) is the other important informal support mechanism identified in the study. These ‘ROSCAS’ were found to be particularly important for women, “as they were largely excluded from formal financial services”.

The fifth route, and the most important route, the authors find, arises from, ‘strategic behaviour’ of having the foresight to see an opportunity and seizing that opportunity. The study shows that well-being of several families have been secured through entrepreneurial activity (considered a form of strategic behaviour). One particular family-history provides an example of such strategic entrepreneurial planning. As a strategy for long-term betterment, the household head started accumulating capital and buying land early on, “some of which he uses for farming and some of which he retains as a speculative investment”. The other instance of the interviewee’s strategic planning is reflected in the fact that he also obtained a government job later on in life, not only for getting regular salary but also to get retirement bonus that could be used for investment.

Based on these findings, the authors conclude that the family-history based study shows that factors that are usually considered important in supporting exit out of poverty do not seem to matter much in these cases. Thus, neither academic qualifications, nor support from the government seem to be important factors in supporting ascent from poverty. On the other hand, “the most stable exits from poverty may be those resulting from a long-term strategic plan”. In this context, they note that the qualitative interviews also highlight the fragility of the ‘ascents’. This confirms the now well-documented ‘saw-tooth’ pattern identified in other research. The other important feature of a family history approach is that it highlights that leaving (or descending into) poverty is a process rather than the result of single event or a combination of causes. These characteristics of the family-history approach, the authors argue, show that it is a valuable method for generating “a holistic, process-based view that adds to the cause and effect findings of longitudinal panel studies”.