Previous page | New search |
The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here
Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | How to Sustain a Living? Urban Households and Poverty in the Sahelian Town of Mopti |
Author: | Harts-Broekhuis, Annelet |
Year: | 1997 |
Periodical: | Africa: Journal of the International African Institute |
Volume: | 67 |
Issue: | 1 |
Pages: | 107-130 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Mali |
Subjects: | urban poverty urban households Urbanization and Migration Economics and Trade |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/1161272 |
Abstract: | During the last ten to fifteen years Africa's urban population has had to deal with diminishing incomes and the increasing cost of living. Despite the steady growth of low-income groups in the urban areas of Africa, the mechanisms for coping with urban poverty were not studied extensively until the end of the 1980s. The present article deals with living conditions and coping mechanisms in Mopti, a town of over 70,000 inhabitants in central Mali. It is based primarily on the outcome of a questionnaire administered to two sample groups drawn from the official residential area and the unplanned, tolerated quarters of the city in the mid-1980s. Factors affecting households' ability to cope with reduced earnings, such as socioeconomic position, migration status, household composition and size, and ethnic background, were taken into account. A central question of the study was whether urban households' strategy, in deteriorating economic circumstances, was to diversify their sources of income or to specialize in one activity. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. |