CW-Department of Educational Foundations

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Browsing CW-Department of Educational Foundations by Author "Ndiritu, John"

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    Communities defining their identities of poverty – “we are poor but we are notsopoor…”
    (CICE SEMINAR SERIES – TOKYO, JAPAN, 2015) Chege, Fatuma N.; Ndiritu, John
    This paper presents findings from the Kenya RECOUP project on Community Scoping and Household Census. It provides basic characteristics of wealth indicators of the research communities, households and constituent families thus yielding a reasonably accurate profiles and understandings of the research communities within the four RECOUP research sites located in Nyeri, Nairobi and Kiambu counties. Both conceptually and methodologically, household censuses and community scopings were used to generate not only the patterns of material conditions and livelihood indicators but also the self-definitions of the communities‟ individual and communal identities based on gender, educational levels and certification, age, family size, habitation, occupation, and family wealth, among others (see household census tool, Appendix 1). Notably, while the concept of poverty has often been associated with absence from benefits accruing from economic and material goods, it was noteworthy how the research communities re-defined poverty in ways that reflected broader, more socio-culturally reflective conceptions that transcend material well-being. Again, while there tendency to link types and levels of school education with financial/economic benefits for individuals and communities exists; the community study revealed that this may not be so in their contexts and lived realities. There was a notable contrast in the way the research communities conceptualised extreme poverty in the context of what emerged as their conceptions of human well-being. However, because education has come to be associated with the eradication of poverty and the enhancement of human well-being – the co-existence of well-being and material poverty becomes difficult to distinguish for many people. This paper pursues constructions of communities‟ self-identities based on articulations that bear cultural insights. The often uni-dimensional concept of poverty as deprivation of material well-being emerges in this study as limiting in both scope and meaning as it tends to lose sight of social and cultural values of good life that are not definable in economic or material terms