Socio-economic and Communication Determinants of Poverty Alleviation Among the Urban Poor

Abstract

While many government programmes have been designed to alleviate poverty among the urban poor, scores of people have continued to languish in wretched poverty. This study sought to determine the impact of communication strategies in enhancing the livelihood of the urban poor in the Eastlands area of Nairobi. The study investigated the key socio-economic and communication determinants of awareness of poverty eradication policies, and assessed the effectiveness of government communication strategies in regard to programmes that target them. Both primary and secondary data were used to quantify the economic contribution of communication to the overall improvement in the standards of the living of the urban poor. The primary data were collected from the field through household surveys.The findings and conclusions of this study indicated that the deficiency of communication strategies in government programmes has complicated their implementation. The end result is that the urban poor have remained deprived even though there could be good intentions by the government to alleviate poverty among them. The recommendation is that in developing poverty alleviation programmes, policy makers should single out urban households as a key target group deserving intensified attention and communicate with them right from design through to the implementation of poverty programmes. It concludes that to be relevant for policy making, the concept of communication strategy should be embraced in government programmes for meaningful economic support and poverty alleviation, as well as for the attainment of the first of the eight Millennium Development Goals - that of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger.