A major shift in household income survey
The government has made a major shift from annual estimates to quarterly ones in conducting this year's household income and expenditure survey (HIES), a top official of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics said yesterday.
Also, division-level estimates will be expanded to district-level estimates, said Dipankar Roy, project director of the survey, BBS.
“This is a major shift to understand poverty at regional level,” Roy said at a programme styled 'Urban poverty: Challenges and solutions conference', held at the LGED auditorium in Dhaka.
Power and Participation Research Centre, an independent think-tank and state-owned BBS jointly organised the two-day event in partnership with the World Bank and United Nations Development Programme. Mustafa K Mujeri, executive director of Institute for Inclusive Finance and Development, chaired the session.
Urban areas of four divisions -- Dhaka, Chittagong, Khulna and Rajshahi -- are further stratified into 'urban' and 'city corporation' strata to capture variability of city samples efficiently in the upcoming HIES, Roy said.
Quoting the preliminary results of a survey on slums in Dhaka city, Monica Yanez-Pagans of the WB's poverty global practice department said non-monetary dimensions are the main reasons for poverty in urban slums instead of monetary ones.
“Slum dwellers are making conscious trade-offs in their living standards in the aim of being closer to a job source.” The WB official said 90 percent of the adult population are born outside slums and over 80 percent families occupy just one room.
According to the report, 38.52 percent poor households fear eviction, of which 52 percent households for non-poor slum dwellers. Though around 90 percent slum dwellers have access to water and electricity, only 18 percent of the poor there have access to proper sanitation, found the report.
Yanez-Pagans also said large-size slums have less poverty rate than the small-sized ones. Of the total urban employed labour force, 77.4 percent are employed in the informal sector, said ATM Nurul Amin, professor of environmental science and management of North South University.
Of the informal sector labour force, about 60 percent live in slum and squatter settlements. The typical informal sector labour include street traders, rickshaw drivers, construction workers, waste pickers, repair service workers, home-based workers etc.
David Hulme, executive director of global development institute of University of Manchester, spoke on the climate variability, vulnerability and poor people in urban areas. Urban poverty in Bangladesh is neglected both in policy and in research, he said.
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