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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:How to Sustain a Living? Urban Households and Poverty in the Sahelian Town of Mopti
Author:Harts-Broekhuis, AnneletISNI
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.
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