PUBLIC SECTOR SALARIATS' POVERTY-COPING MECHANISMS: A COMPARATIVE CASE FROM EL-OBEID

Ibrahim M. G. Sahl *

Abstract: This paper attempts to develop a modality through which anti-poverty effects of adjustment mechanisms can be quantified. It compares the salariats in Khartoum with those in El-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan State, in Western Sudan, so as to provide a profile of the living conditions of the salariats in the public sector. Salariats' expenditure was as high as income and reaches about 4-times their salary. All adjustment mechanisms applied by the salariats failed to bridge this gap as they erode resources and increase vulnerability to poverty, while the earnings (salaries) are insufficient to provide a relatively decent life. In most cases, the direct implications are a brain drain out of the country, withdrawal from the public sector or, if salaraiats stayed within it, a resort to corruption and immoral practices, thus further weakening the already beleaguered civil service.

1. PRELUDE

The last few decades have witnessed a significant shift in the concept of development from macroeconomic to more microeconomic studies. More recently, poverty has become the main occupation of researchers, governments, UN agencies, NGOs and some specialised international development agencies. The UN has designated the period 1997-2006 as the decade for poverty eradication. Since the overall objective is a "humane development", people are presumed to play a major role in assuming the initiative, management of and control over resources, as well as the setting of priorities.

The translation of this idea into reality necessitates the investigation of people's adjustment to, or coping with, chaotic socio-economic situations and catastrophes (both man-made and natural), be they food insecurity, hunger, famine outbreaks, or poverty. Some of these crises, in many cases, are not occasional occurrences, rather they are consequences of long processes, especially poverty which is caused by a combination of interacting factors of social, economic, political and natural dimensions (Abdel Ati 1996).

One main objective of this paper¹ is to provide a profile of the living conditions of the salariats in the public sector vis-à-vis the increasing cost of living and deteriorating real incomes. This will be achieved, both quantitatively and qualitatively, by throwing some light on the adjustment/coping strategies originated by the salariats in trying to survive and, at best, balance the income-expenditure gap. By doing so, this paper seeks to develop a modality via which anti-poverty effects of different coping methods can be quantified and/or gauged.

2. DEBATE ON POVERTY: A CRITIQUE

Although there exists a growing literature on poverty, there is as yet no consensus on the concept and definition of poverty. However, poverty is either absolutely gauged, relatively designated, or subjectively viewed by the poor themselves. Absolute poverty focuses on the poor regardless of others; it relates to the state of "inability to attain a minimal standard of living" (WB 1990, 26). It means the lack of what is considered as basic human needs, the fulfilment of which is a substantive component for a "decent living" which is, in turn, subject to some arbitrary measures and varies from one group to another. While absolute poverty lays emphasis on the "subsistence" standard of living, relative poverty is concerned with issues of income/wealth distribution; it identifies the poor relative to other segments of the society. Subjective poverty, on the other hand, is a self-destined concept which reflects the attitude of a person towards what he/she considers the minimum to meet basic human needs, i.e., "comparing actual income against the earner's expectations and perceptions" (WB 1996, 67). Although the concept has witnessed some recent development, poverty is traditionally measured by the well-known indicator of poverty lines, whether absolute, relative or subjective (Ravallion 1992, 1996; Ali 1994; WB 1990; Foster et al. 1984; Sen 1981, 1979).

These measures, however, suffer some conceptual and methodological weaknesses that need to be considered as a prerequisite for a proper definition of poverty and identification of the poor. These include: (i) its lack of a time dimension as it defines the poor at a point in time, irrespective of how long one remains poor, given his/her ability/inability to secure basic needs; (ii) it treats poverty on the basis of "staying-alive", i.e., on the survival margin; (iii) it is based on an assumption that nutritional requirements are the same for all segments of the society; (iv) it highly relies on monetary measures with small or no regard to those of non-monetary nature; (v) it treats poverty as an incident/transient, not a process, i.e., it overlooks the root causes of poverty and, thus, remedies are relief-like solutions ; (vi) it is highly economic-oriented with no regard to poverty as a social phenomenon; (vii) it overlooks the poor's own perception of poverty; and (viii) it fails to combine the relative and absolute poverty into one concept when defining the poor, or designing policies to alleviate poverty, i.e., it uses a single predetermined approach.

3. POVERTY IN SUDAN

Studies on poverty in Sudan, though few, are relatively old compared to other developing countries, dating to the mid 1950s. Those studies were mainly linked to the regional inequalities as the problem of poverty was not conceptualised; this is because poverty was not as severe then as it is now. Recent studies, however, have revealed that the evolution and manifestations of poverty in Sudan are increasing at alarming rates (in scale and severity). According to these studies (Ali 1992, 1994; Nur 1996; Sahl 1996a), the bulk of the Sudanese population, estimated between about 80% and 94%, have been engulfed in absolute poverty. For example, for the years 1968, 1978, 1986, and 1993, the ratios of those below the nutrition-based absolute poverty lines were about 52%, 54%, 78%, and 91%, respectively. For the same periods, poverty gaps were 25%, 23%, 45%, and 59%; and the household/annum poverty line was estimated to be Ls.136, Ls.777, Ls.6384, and Ls.270,000 (Ali 1994, 90-100). These estimates are critical for policy makers since they answer the key policy questions of how many people are poor, how far below the poverty line their incomes fall and the duration of the period after they became poor, i.e., whether their poverty is transient or long-run (WB 1996, 67).

There are many interacting factors that have increasingly contributed to the transformation of the state of poverty in Sudan into a process of impoverishment. These include: (i) change of the traditional (subsistence) economy into the capitalist (market) system; (ii) successive failures of ad hoc macroeconomic policies; (iii) political instability and civil wars; (iv) bad governance and lack of transparency and/or accountability; (v) repeated occurrences of natural calamities; (vi) rural-urban socio-economic and demographic imbalances; (vii) the growing earning-need and rich-poor gaps; (viii) the IMF/World Bank and economic liberalisation policies; (ix) urban sprawl; (x) mismanagement and planning of natural resources; (xi) muscle-, brain-, and hard-currency drain; (xii) concentration of development efforts (activities) in the centre and the neglect of the peripheries; and (xiii) lack of legal rights (Awad 1992, 1996a, 1996b, 1997; Ali 1994; Abdel Ati 1996).

In particular, many chaotic socio-economic crises were attributed to the IMF-World Bank stabilisation and adjustment policies (1978-85), accompanied by the economic liberalisation measures adopted in the 1990s (Awad 1996b; Ali 1994). Those policies, however, are growth-oriented with little or no regard to the distributional effects and social concussions. One result is the increasing process of impoverishment in which the majority of the Sudanese are unable to attain minimum basic needs. Many of them (the poor), thus, opted to engineer alternatives within available resources to strengthen their purchasing power and satisfy basic needs, i.e., to bridge the income-need gap.

4. THE PROBLEM

Though it is an old phenomenon in Sudan, poverty is one of the least researched, especially the adaptation methods. Most studies revealed that in most households' budgets, expenditure exceeds income by about 3-folds and more (Nur 1996; Sahl 1996a). This study is an attempt to understand and assess how public sector salariats engineer alternatives within available resources (physical and human) to close the income-expenditure gap on the basis of the assumption that "a small deficit in the budget is a sufficient factor to mobilise household's `sedentary' resources" (Sahl 1996c, 2).

Social solidarity between the Sudanese working abroad and the relatives at home (both in and outside the kinship web) proved effective in managing the poverty phenomenon and transferring it into a "disguised poverty". This is true, especially in the case of the salaried employees because it has been found that coping and survival methods have reduced the head-count ratio from about 94%, if measured by salary alone, to about 61% when measured by the total income, and to about 41% when that portion of "clandestine" income is captured at the expenditure side (Ibid.).

This study is also an extension to a previous one (Sahl 1996a) on the adjustment mechanisms (coping and survival) of the public sector employees in Sudan, by which they close the income-expenditure gap. While the pervious study was conducted in Greater Khartoum, the present one is in El-Obeid, being a town in a rural setting. Both studies were based on a questionnaire (as well as unstructured interviews) so as to reflect "common" traditional and "specific" mechanisms of fighting poverty among salaried employees in the two areas. El-Obeid has been selected as a case study with four main assumptions. These include that public sector salariats in rural towns: (i) receive some subsidies (car, house, etc.); (ii) face high cost of living; (iii) have different consumption habits; and (iv) have other alternatives than those in Khartoum.

5. MEASURING POVERTY: METHODOLOGIES

Data for this study was collected from the public sector employees at El-Obeid town at the household level (30 households) and it covered income, expenditure, coping/survival practices as well as demographic characteristics. Poverty is, in most cases, studied in terms of individuals rather than households. But since it is too difficult to generate data on individual's consumption, we had to convert and standardise household size from head-count into its male adult-equivalent using Nur's 1996 index. This index guarantees the actual welfare distribution with variation in age and gender, as well as the scaling of poverty at the individual rather than household level according to the following formula (see table 1):

A(C^h) = a_i m^h_i _ i _ n

where: A(ch) denotes the male adult-equivalent of household; ch is a vector for household characteristics; ai is an adjustment factor; and mih is an i household member.

Table 1. Adult-equivalent indexes for Sudan

Age group (years)	Males	Females
Children (00-09) Adolescents (10-19) Adults (20-over)	0.55 0.95 1.00	0.48 0.79 0.75

SOURCE: E. T. M. Nur, Poverty in Sudan in 1992, with and without

coping practices. CBS and UNICEF, Khartoum, 1996.

5.1 Welfare Indicators

Inspite of its conceptual weaknesses and because of lack of an applicable alternative, the working definition was that of the absolute poverty. Monetary welfare indicators have been used as long as the income and expenditure are observable, comparable, measurable, computable and distributable. However, part of the income could not be accounted for either because of lack of records, or because of its clandestine nature, e.g., "bad money". We, therefore, combined the expenditure indicator to cater for that portion of income. The disposable income was taken to include all sources, while salary was taken as the reference (main) one, and gradually aggregated using the following formula:

Yt =	k	(Ym+Yai )
	i=1

where Yt is total income, Ym is the main income and Ya is the additional income from other sources (from: i=1 to k), such as secondary jobs, contribution of other working family members, transfers, donations, remittances from inside and abroad, disposal of possessions, rents, revenue from businesses, etc. However, such a breakdown enables showing the anti-poverty effect of these incomes.

In this connection, poverty has been studied from three dimensions, namely: (i) poverty without coping mechanisms when only emphasising the main income (salary); (ii) poverty with coping practices when successively adding other supporting incomes; and (iii) poverty with coping practices when using expenditure indicator to capture that clandestine income not reflected on income data.

5.2 Poverty Indicators

Poverty is usually measured in terms of incidence, depth and severity. The incidence of poverty is measured by the well-known head-count ratio (H), i.e., the poor units (q) as a proportion of the total population (n). For the depth of poverty - how far the income of the poor, (Yi) is below the poverty line (Z) - the income-gap ratio (I) is always used. These two indices are a direct derivation of the FGT, Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (1984), the index in the form of a poverty gap (PV_):

		q
PV_ =	1/n		[(Z-Yi )/Z] _
		i=1

This index has the advantages of reflecting the incidence, intensity and severity of poverty, i.e., the income distribution among the poor. But we are going to use that version of the index when (_ = 0&1). To satisfy our objective, we derived the following equation to substitute the average income/expenditure (y) as a measuring rod:

		q
PV_=1 =	q/n		[(1-y )/Z] _ = HI
		i=1

6. POVERTY LINE ESTIMATES IN EL-OBEID

Usually, to distinguish the poor from the non-poor, economists delineate a money-metric poverty line to calculate the cost of a minimum bundle that is assumed to provide minimum nutritional requirements for physical existence. In this study, we applied an absolute urban poverty line based on Nur (1996) and using El-Obeid prevailing market prices in May 1997. However, as shown in table 2, a nutrition-based absolute food poverty line (Zf) was estimated at Ls. 51,943.5 per person/month. This figure represents the cost of raw foods that require an amount of cooking fuel valued at Ls. 2,000 per person/month (i.e., Zf = Ls. 53,943.5).

Since poverty is multidimensional, we had to consider spending on non-food items so as to estimate an absolute poverty line (Z) that includes both food and non-food items using an adjustment factor (a) as in the following formula:

Z = Zf (1+a)

where (a) represents the percentage of income spent on non-food items as a proportion of total household's expenditure. Our field data showed that the expenditure on non-food items represents 20.8%, and 43% of household's total spending for El-Obeid and Khartoum, respectively. The small proportion of spending on non-food items, in El-Obeid, indicates the high cost of living (food items), difference in consumption patterns and the degree of sophistication of urban life, if compared to Khartoum. Based on the above figure (20.8%), it is clear that the poverty line (Z) is equivalent to about Ls. 65,000 for an individual per month. This figure is equivalent to US $ 43.3, on average.

7. MAGNITUDES OF POVERTY AMONG PUBLIC SECTOR SALARIATS IN EL-OBEID

Five resultant incomes were calculated to scale poverty: (i) the main income from salary (Yn); (ii) income (Y1), after adding income from secondary jobs; (iii) income (Y2), after adding contributions of other working family members; (iv) total aggregate income (Yt) after adding all other sources of income (remittances, transfers, donations, etc.) ; and (v) income (Ye), when considering income expenditure.

Table 2. Urban food poverty line per person/day (El-Obeid, May 1997)

SOURCE: Author's calculations, based on Nur (1996), at El-Obeid market prices (May 1997).

Based on the above, it was found that the majority (96.7%) of the public sector salaried employees, under study, are below the poverty line when measured against salary alone, and that expenditure is about four times the salary (table 3). Adding different supplementary incomes, the percentage of the poor decreases, and the income-expenditure gap is narrowed, till it reaches the aggregate disposable income (Yt). However, several incomes were not reported because of either lack of records or the respondents' intention not to reveal them. Therefore, we have taken into consideration the expenditure indicator to cater for that portion of income not mentioned in income data. The percentage of those below the poverty line, after adding these incomes, was 76.7%, which implies that coping practices relating to both income and expenditure have an anti-poverty effect of 20%, and of 6.6% (20.0%-13.4%) of those relating to clandestine income sources.

Table 3. Magnitudes of poverty among public sector salariats in El-Obeid

Income	Mean income	H (%)	Tot. anti-poverty effects (%)	Income-exp. times	Income gap (I)	Poverty Gap (1) (%)
Yn Y1 Y2 Yt Ye	11762.1 12183.9 16531.9 23427.9 43527.7	96.7 93.4 93.4 83.3 76.7	0.0 3.3 0.0 13.4 20.0	3.7 3.6 2.6 1.9 1.0	0.82 0.81 0.75 0.64 0.33	79.0 75.9 69.6 53.3 25.3
Poverty line (person/month) = Ls. 65,000

SOURCE: Survey data (El-Obeid), May 1997.

These results suggest that expenditure exceeds basic income from salary by about 4-folds, and that this income is below the poverty line by about 453%. Comparing these results with those of Khartoum (in 1996), we note that the total cumulative anti-poverty effects of coping practices in Khartoum are relatively stronger than those in the case of El-Obeid (table 4), and that the contribution of other working family members (part of Y2) has no effect on the family's budget and, hence, the head-count ratio (in the case of El-Obeid). In our view, this may be attributed to the limited work and investment opportunities, as well as to the shrinking informal sector that could absorb new income-earners (children, wives, etc.).

Table 4. Effects of salariats' coping practices in reducing poverty

Source: Survey data (Khartoum 1996; El-Obeid 1997).

8. ADJUSTMENT METHODS

In their simplest form, adjustment methods2 (coping and survival) refer to "the ordinary mechanisms people pursue to engineer possible available alternatives to balance income-expenditure gap, handle possible difficult situations, and/or possibly make some savings ... as `postponed consumption' withheld for contingencies ... rather than a form of wealth accumulation" (Sahl 1996c, 10). However, it is of significance to differentiate between what is termed as `coping' and `survival' methods that have, in most cases, been confused and treated to be the same. Coping practices are long-term actions as long as they are alternatives under situation of imposition; and with coping practices there are many choices and a room for saving (via increasing income earning). In comparison, survival strategies are short-term in nature; they imply limited choices; they are a simple management of meagre resources to maintain survival; and they are nothing but a reduction in consumption (qualitative and quantitative) rather than an increase in income (Ibid.).

Based on our two surveys, in Khartoum and El-Obeid, the public sector employees were found to share common adjustment methods, some of which relate to income generation practices, while others are primarily adjustment in consumption, though some of the strategies listed below are more prevailing in Khartoum, where there are relatively more investment and work opportunities. These are as follows:

8.1 Income Diversification Strategies

In these strategies, people opt to change their prior-to-poverty activities and income portfolio by the involvement of the head of the household or some of its members in secondary activities besides their main occupations, such as investment in businesses like transport, services, trade and agriculture.

8.2 Disposal of Possessions

This includes disposal of physical and productive possessions/properties, such as land and real estates and household's domestic items, including houses, private cars, old clothes, electronics, scrap, furniture, wives' gold and savings in hard currencies, when they exist. It is widely recognised that liquidation of these assets is for consumption purposes, debt repayment, or for contingencies (marriage, sickness, death).

8.3 Readjustment Strategies

These represent changes in utilisation patterns of assets and/or consumption behaviour (norms). People's increasing awareness about the jeopardy of poverty made them reconsider what, when and how properties should be readjusted or restructured in terms of ownership and utilisation. The two components of these strategies are as follows:

8.3.1 New Forms of Assets Utilisation

Change in utilisation of assets/properties included rent/sale or relocation of a house in terms of size and class of residential areas; turning of private cars into taxis, etc. Some families have opted to live in part of a house and they either share, if it is rented, to reduce cost, or rent out part of their house as a source of extra income. Other families have shifted to lower class residential areas while renting/selling their houses that are located in higher class areas to make use of the difference in rent/price, especially the advance which is in most cases invested to add a new source of income.

8.3.2 Cutting-back on Consumption

Such cuts have been generally qualitative, though sometimes it involves some temporary quantitative cutback on consumption. Many families have changed to two meals a day (instead of three) with concentration on basic food items and getting rid of extras, such as fruits and desserts. In this respect, women have also played an effective role as controllers over the quality and quantity of food intake and cost of cooking by cutting on wastes.

8.4 Group Solidarity Strategies

These are the joint responses taken by Sudanese household members, within the context of their social networks, to reduce the impact of poverty. These strategies are of the following two types.

8.4.1 Increasing the Number of Income-Earners

Increasing the number of income-earners within the household is mainly by allowing and/or sometimes pushing women (wives) and children to work. This replaced the common system of dependency on one income-earner (the head of household). Women, besides their domestic responsibilities, started to get engaged in in- and out-door activities, namely, knitting, sewing, dress-making, food selling, making of marketable traditional perfumes, decoration accessories, and the like on commercial purposes to support the household. They may also take other domestic productive activities such as poultry production, animal herding, etc., both for the family consumption and as a source of extra income. Indeed, engagement of women in productive employment and/or activities is one positive impact of poverty. Children, including school-children, on the other hand, are also pushed to work by engaging in selling magazines, cigarettes, plastic bags, vegetables, car washing, shoe-shining, etc. Most of these activities are practised within the domain of the informal (casual) sector of the economy that has recently come to absorb a wider segment of the Sudanese society.

8.4.2 External Support Mechanisms

These include, besides borrowing, transfers and remittances of emigrants, friends and relatives within and outside the kinship structure.

8.5 The One-day Trade Strategy

In its simplest form, it is taking the form of investing the salary proceeds in open markets (of vegetables) to provide family needs out of the profits and keep the invested sum untouched. In particular, this strategy was found to be practised by salariats in Khartoum.

8.6 The High-Risk Quick-Revenue Strategy

This form is practised by some salariats, especially those who retired and/or were made redundant, in a gambling-like manner, selling their assets and possessions to invest in highly speculative but quite remunerative trade activities. Examples of these are buying auctioned properties, agricultural produce, currency, cars, exportable products of a perishable nature, etc., for sale at a profit. Again, this was also one of those adjustment strategies among salariats in Khartoum.

8.7. Specific Adjustment Methods of El-Obeid Salariats

Public sector employees in rural towns have their own specific adjustment methods because of the difference in market structure. For example, Khartoum is characterised by the expanding informal sector, which absorbs many marginal activities, while El-Obeid, to some extent, lacks such an advantage. As a result, government employees in El-Obeid developed their own alternative adjustment mechanisms that suit the local situation. These include the following.

8.7.1 Personal Relations As a Measure for Reducing Cost of Living

This is one form of utilising personal relations to obtain free or discounted services fees, such as medical services and the like. Another form is the dependence for the provision of some food items (dura) on relatives or friends in the nearby villages. These mechanisms to some extent constitute income-transfer or a built-in redistributive measure since they mainly depend on social networking considered by some civil servants as a solidarity-beggary.

8.7.2 Rural-Urban Itinerary Trading

Rural areas are characterised by having certain market days. These markets came to serve as a network between people in towns and those in the outskirts. The process of trade in these markets is itinerary (tijarat umdawarwar ) in nature since each village has its own market day. Among those who are extensively involved in these markets are women, in particular, who trade in livestock products (chicken, eggs, samin, milk, etc.) and some other agricultural products. Wives of the salariats sometimes work either as agents for those village women or as buyers on instalment and/or a barter basis.

8.7.3 Office-Related Benefits

These are legitimate and illegitimate benefits that one can get at the office. There are three forms of legitimate benefits: (i) the "agriculture-leave" given to civil servants in El-Obeid which they use to cultivate small plots near the town for consumption as well as commercial purposes; (ii) allowances of official missions (duty-travels) and this, in fact, generates some sort of competition and discrimination among civil servants; and (iii) occasional cash and in-kind donations such as subsidies by the State (e.g., Eleid, Ghoot al Amilin, etc.)

Usually, some government employees build a network with others in other government and/or private sector institutions to serve each other (illegitimate benefits). The basis for these networks is what can be labelled as reciprocal "back-scratching" since the involved parties are expected to reciprocate services. The process of this scenario may, sometimes, start at the top-level of parastatals and, in others, from bottom-level. The end result of this phenomenon could be described as a spillover corruption. For example, one such a strategy among some salaried, as they admit, is the trading with intermediaries in commodities' licenses of those goods monopolised by the State. The difference between the sale and official price, in most cases, exceeds the salary.

8.7.4 Working All the Year

Government employees in rural towns sometimes sacrifice their leisure to get extra income for the family. They sell their annual official leave in exchange of salary and other related benefits. Of course, this has its significant implications in terms of health, psychological pressure and work efficiency. In this way, civil servants appear as if they work more than 12 months, i.e., "teen" months a year.

9. SURVIVING POVERTY: THE "ROLLING OF AN EMPTY BALL"

According to the results of our present study as well as the previous one, all those mechanisms failed to bridge the gap between income and needs and, sometimes, compelled them to opt for some other illegitimate practices. Our survey results showed that the income-expenditure times are about three and four for the salariats in Khartoum and El-Obeid, respectively. Similarly, the shares of clandestine incomes are 37% and 33% of the total anti-poverty effects (table 5).

Some coping practices are exhausting and they normally erode the poor's resources, e.g., secondary jobs, cut-back on consumption, disposal of possessions, etc. (table 6). These practices are mainly a result of insufficiency of the single income source (salary) to meet the family's basic needs since expenditure is about 3- and about 4-times the salary, respectively, in Khartoum and El-Obeid. The ironic situation is that the poor civil servants' exhaustion of all their resources and potentials, does not guarantee closing the gap. The direct implication and/or consequence may inevitably be "a brain-drain out of the country, withdrawal from the public sector or, if they stayed within it, a resort to corruption and/or immoral practices, thus further weakening the already beleaguered civil services" (Sahl 1996c, 8).

Table 5. Percentage share of coping methods in total anti-poverty effects

Income source	Khartoum (1996)		El-Obeid (1997)
	Head-Count (H%)	Percentage share in total anti-pov. effects	Head-count (H%)	Percentage share in total anti-pov. effects
Income Yn Income Y1 Income Y2 Income Yt Clandestine income	93.8 81.5 77.7 60.8 41.5	00.0 23.5 07.3 32.3 36.9	96.7 93.4 93.4 83.3 76.7	00.0 16.5 00.0 50.5 33.0
Total	52.3	100.0	20.01	100.0
Income-exp. times	2.7-times		3.7-times
Exp. on food items	57.0%		79.2%

SOURCE: Field surveys (Khartoum, 1996; El-Obeid, 1997).

Table 6. Some common adjustment practices of the salariats

Mechanism	Percentage of HHs (Khartoum)	Percentage of HHs (El-Obeid)
Secondary Occupations Increasing no. of income-earners Borrowing Cut-back on consumption Disposal of possessions External support Utilisation of property Domestic production	63.0 63.9 78.2 57.1 65.5 97.8 28.6 32.2	56.7 56.7 83.3 100.0 63.3 20.0 26.7 23.3

SOURCE: Surveys in Khartoum (1996) and in El-Obeid (1997).

In this sense, the salariats' mechanisms to survive poverty become like the rolling of an empty ball since they erode resources and increase vulnerability to poverty, while the earnings (salaries) are always insufficient to close the income-expenditure gap or provide a relatively decent life.

10. FINDINGS AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS

The main findings of this study are the following.

i. Based on our statistical estimates, it is clear that the bulk of the salariats in the pubic sector have been pushed below the poverty line and relegated to a category of the "new poor". As a result, the salariats have increasingly been looked down upon by the public as a result of the social valuation system.

ii. Our two surveys have revealed that, despite the different adjustment measures, still there is a gap between income and expenditure. But, some salariats are still clinging to their jobs. One main emphasis is that the public sector has some advantages over the private sector, for example, these include job security and social insurance measures such as pension benefits, fringe benefits (e.g., housing and vehicle), etc.

iii. The confusion between liberalisation and privatisation policies in Sudan has aggravated the situation of poverty as the salary and wage earners are the main losers. Liberalisation usually means removal of price controls in a way that equally distributes costs and benefits among the three markets: of labour, goods and money. What happened in Sudan is that both goods and money markets were liberalised while the labour market has, in effect, been left frozen. Therefore, there is a need to liberalise all prices, including labour prices (wages and salaries) and introduce some measures that leave them more flexible with the market forces.

iv. The informal sector in Sudan has become a resort for those jobless and, even university graduates, because it requires small capital, little skills and education. The importance of the informal sector stems from the increasing inflows of those deprived of their jobs in the public sector, government policies of National Military Service and those who have been made redundant either because of privatisation or the so-called public interest (elsalih ala'am).

v. For instance, one question that dedicates itself is what will happen when the salariats exhaust all available alternatives and fail to bridge the income-expenditure gap? This, most likely, may compel them either to go abroad, defect from the public sector, or resort to corruption. However, those defectors from the public sector may need to be studied so as to investigate changes (positive or negative) in their living conditions before and after their defection.

vi. With the increasing costs of living and deteriorating real incomes, the non-poor may find nothing to transfer to the poor segments of the society. This may indefinitely abate the effectiveness of the existing social mechanisms and, at least, lead to social disintegration and loss of identity, and thus, in the context of an overall socio-economic deterioration, widen vulnerability to poverty.

The main policy implications include the following.

i. The main philosophy behind development action is that its fruits are assumed to track out the most needy segments of the society. Decisions that were meant to fight poverty are originally "humane" in nature. To aid these decisions, initiatives should start at the community level in a participatory approach in which development rotates around people. This prompts one to investigate the poor's adjustment and social mechanisms, as well as the possibility of their participation, in shaping the development processes vis-à-vis the ways they view as appropriate solutions and directly compatible with their resource endowments and indigenous technical knowledge. To be successful, development policies should make use of and absorb those traditional social mechanisms and practices used in managing crises. In this way, each society can utilise and harvest the benefits of its own social mechanisms and qualities for an indigenous decision-making that suits its resources, comparative advantage and local set-up.

ii. The main philosophy behind the consideration of coping and survival methods is that they reflect the poor's own autonomous choices, although the choice is always limited, rather than imposed or borrowed models. Of great importance is that some of the poor's adaptation methods are directed towards consumption (survival) and others to productive development activities (coping). Thus, poverty-alleviating actions should strengthen those productive activities and curb those devoted to consumption to avoid eroding the poor's physical and human resources, diminishing their productivity or limiting their ability to cope and/or survive.

iii. Given the failures of the past, it is our view that any sound anti-poverty policy should aim at utilising traditional mechanisms via empowering the poor economically (earning), politically (control over resources), and socially (making choices and decisions). Such an approach would transform them from a state of need to be productive and self-reliant. Thus, our anti-poverty policy can be developmental in nature aiming at structural qualitative change through a socially-defined route rather than relief-like solutions.

iv. The idea of "helping people help themselves" (WB 1996, 72) can best be applied with special emphasis on people's adjustment mechanisms to poverty. What is needed is to reshape these skills and endowments from being devoted to consumption into being devoted to productive activities through more transferable and marketable skills so as to contribute to productivity, efficiency and better quality of life. To create an incentive to work and innovate, we need to equip and empower poor people lest they feel left behind or marginalised. Equipment itself is some sort of development of production-oriented resources and it takes two forms, namely, mental and physical equipment. Mental equipment means raising people's awareness about their ability to produce as well as providing them with the shortest possible approach to mobilise and hence optimise resources. Physical equipment, on the other hand, requires making available training opportunities, production tools, initial capitals, productive employment, work incentive, equal access to resources, as well as diversification of knowledge for the purpose of complementarity rather than competition among different activities.

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* Research and Policy Officer, ACORD-Sudan, P.O. Box 986, Khartoum, Fax 249-11- 472527.

1 Dr. Hassan A. Ati, Dr. Omer Egemi and Ust. M. A. Munzul are gratefully acknowledged for their constructive comments on an initial draft of this paper. Any errors in content, however, are the author's.

2 For purposes of comparison, see table 6 in Section 9.