As is known from the growing body of literature on development, one of the most challenging and pressing issues facing the development community at a global level is how to reduce poverty. Indeed, reducing poverty is seen by many as a fundamental objective of development. Yet, achieving this objective requires greater and deeper knowledge about the poor: their number, characteristics, economic conditions, locations, the way they live, in addition to the way they respond to their changing environment and socio-economic situation.
Possessing this knowledge is the key to a selective attack on poverty. A selective attack on poverty is defined in terms of the elimination of the symptoms of poverty, such as - inter alia - a progressive reduction and eventual elimination of malnutrition, disease, illiteracy, squalor, unemployment and inequalities (Mahbub Ul Hag 1976). In addition, it also means alleviating the suffering of those who have fallen victims to economic crisis, and man-made as well as natural calamities. Thus, governments and voluntary agencies are expected to respond quickly by finding strategic options to relieve those victims, who are generally the masses of the urban poor, the displaced, and refugees.
It is common knowledge that, since independence, many developing countries, including Sudan, have been adopting different policies to reduce poverty. Although some of them have recorded a remarkable rate of increase in economic growth, most of them have failed to reduce the rates of poverty or sustain a process of that reduction, and some have even maintained the status quo of the colonial era (Mohamed 1992). Accordingly, social development and poverty alleviation have not yet been realised. Consequently, the issue of poverty has been a controversy and a challenge both to the students of poverty and governments alike.
Although there have been development efforts for many decades, it is debated that there have been no tangible improvements in people lives. Instead, living standards were impoverished rather than enhanced. This is because the prevailing policies and strategies, especially the stabilisation and adjustment policies adopted with or without the assistance of the IMF and the World Bank, were aimed at the realisation of economic efficiency regardless of their negative socio-economic impact, say for instance, on the employment and living standards of different vulnerable groups (UNICEF 1987).
The policies and strategies of stabilisation and adjustment have enlarged the poverty cycle in which a large segment of the local population was trapped. In particular, it is observed that those who were previously classified as being above an acceptable minimum level of subsistence, such as the middle-class, are now continuously falling below that level and becoming the "new poor".
Some of the development economists have also argued that most of the development planners aim at attaining a high growth rate in the Gross National Product (GNP) regardless of the real goal of development, which is economic growth with justice. Economic growth is not an end in itself; it is has human, social and economic magnitudes. This supports the view that development is a many-sided dynamic process which should benefit the most needy segment of the local population. In many developing countries, however, the masses are complaining that development has not reached them. Instead, growth has been attended by high rates of unemployment and absolute and relative deprivation. This calls for putting the needs of the poor as a top priority; economic growth and efficiency should come later.
Ul Hag has put this aptly when he sai "We are taught to take care of our GNP as this will take care of poverty. Let us reverse this and take care of poverty, as this will take care of GNP. In other words, let us worry about the content of GNP rather than its rate of increase" (Ul Hag 1976). Ul Hag adds: what is needed is a direct attack on mass poverty and new development strategies built on the gratification of basic needs.
This statement reflects the changing emphasis of development from macro economic to more micro-economic measures. This conception of development entails a participatory approach in which people share in taking the initiative, decision-making and control of resources. This implies that development should rotate around people rather than people adhering to what is seen as a development requirement. Accordingly, the idea of aggregate economic growth, as an acknowledged objective of development, has been reconsidered because of the drawbacks of the Gross National Product (Fields 1980). Therefore, other micro-economic aspects of development, with special emphasis on poverty, have replaced the outmoded ones.
This study is an attempt to highlight the living conditions of the Sudanese middle-class. The middle-class is defined by characteristics other than income. Our definition of the word class is synonymous with what is known as stratum. According to Abdel Ghaffar (1984), the uneven and unequal development between regions and ethnic groups has brought about a striking emergence of a variety of new socio-economic strata in the Sudanese society. These strata, in turn, can be "referred to as more or less, as classes in the very general sense of the term" (Abdel Ghaffar 1984). By this it is meant that the term class is not to be politically and socially loaded. This is simply because our purpose is to specifically determine the poor middle-class and, then, to investigate the poverty situation within this class. The target groups of this study are the fixed income groups (the salaried) of the urban public sector in Greater Khartoum. These groups were taken as representatives of the middle-class.
On the basis of the above, the middle-class in Sudan consists of many strata. The terms middle class, middle strata and intermediate strata will be used interchangeably with the same weight.
Due to the persistent economic crisis, this class has witnessed dramatic changes. Faced with these changes, the members of this class have adopted many coping strategies to close the gap between their fixed income and the increasing cost of living. Consequently, many people who were previously classified as being above the poverty line, such as the intermediate strata, have now fallen below that level. Their economic and social status has, therefore, deteriorated accordingly.
In this paper, Chapter One introduces the research problem, objectives, hypotheses, sources of data and the methods of its collection and analysis.
Chapter Two mainly provides the literature review, with emphasis on the definitions of poverty and poverty-related concepts. This chapter also covers the theoretical orientation, working definitions as well as the method of estimating the poverty line for Sudan.
Chapter Three describes the data collected from the field and other relevant secondary sources. Poverty line estimates, poverty measures and behaviour are also treated here.
Chapter Four presents a qualitative description of the coping practices applied by the middle-class to bridge the gap between income and expenditure. Chapter Five provides the concluding remarks and observations.
Since independence in 1956, the Sudan has been adopting different policies that failed to achieve concrete development until the late 1960's. In the early 1970's, the government had very ambitious policies, with special emphasis on agricultural development as the Sudan was then planned to become the breadbasket of the Arab World. Those policies failed to realise their objectives and the State turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the late 1970's. The economic crisis was accelerated by war in the South and by environmental hazards such as droughts and desertification since the early 1980's. There is no doubt that the persistent state of crisis pertaining in the present day Sudan is deeply related to the population dynamics represented by the inter-country migration and the brain drain.
The result was a growing economic crisis and an accelerating poverty. Thus, the then prevailing strata, which has been evolving since the colonial era, has been undergoing major changes due to the rising poverty line which came to cover many groups that were in the high and the middle-level of the Sudanese society.
Monitoring the poverty situation in the Sudan has revealed that "poverty in the Sudan as measured by all poverty ratios has increased rather substantially between 1978 and 1986. In absolute sense, the results show that the number of poor households increased from 1.6 million in 1978 to 2.6 million in 1986, thus recording an annual rate of increase of 6.2%" (Ali 1992). According to Ali, the absolute poverty lines for the years 1978 and 1986 were Ls. 777 and 6,384 respectively. This means that the poverty line has also been increasing at an annual rate of 30.1%.
Given this increase, it can be concluded that the poverty line, in an absolute sense, has been shifting upwards to incorporate a wider segment of the middle class which has vanished or is at least in the process of disappearing.
Most studies on poverty, both at the local level and world wide, are devoted to the poor, i.e., to those who have already fallen below the poverty threshold. It is perceived in these studies that economic development is a dynamic process which requires, among other things, an increase in real per capita for a long duration of time (Meier 1976). This implies that attention should be paid not only to those classified as poor but also to other groups, the fixed income groups in our case, who are affected by any upward move in the poverty line.
Unfortunately, the changing socio-economic conditions in the Sudan, have had negative consequences on the different socio-economic groups. Economically and socially, the middle class in the Sudan has originally constituted an important category. Due to economic crisis and the aggravation of the state of poverty, members of this class are continuously falling below the poverty line and can now be classified as the "new poor." Therefore, their conditions, constraints, and needs should be identified as a basis for policy-making.
This study has been undertaken with the following objectives:
· To analyse the poverty situation in urban Sudan
· To identify the impact of the poverty situation on the class structure
· To evaluate the State policies towards the poor and to show how the economic policy-making can be given a social dimension
· To review the relationship between the evolution of the economic structure in Sudan during the last decades and the emerging class structure
· To show how the middle-income households try to close the gap between their fixed incomes and the increasing poverty line, i.e., to identify the coping strategies of this group under conditions of increasing of poverty.
The study is based on the following hypotheses:
· The causes of poverty are of a national and international nature as they are generally related to the trends of privatisation within the context of implementing economic liberalisation policies.
· Economic difficulties lead to inflation, decrease real income, and continuously lower the living standards of most income groups, especially the poor.
· Urban poverty is generally a reflection of rural poverty.
· In the course of economic deterioration, the commercial sector tends to grow at the expense of the middle class, and, thus, merchants move towards the upper level of the class structure while the salaried groups move below the minimum standard of living.
· The middle class is in the process of disappearing as most of its members are joining the lower income groups.
· The evolution of the class structure in Sudan is reversible.
However, this does not imply that we will definitely be able to prove all of these hypotheses. Those, which we will not be able to prove will be recommended for further investigation.
This study uses both quantitative and qualitative modes of analysis in its attempt to show the impact of the poverty on the middle class. The qualitative analysis of poverty is the investigation of the repercussions of policy changes on the living conditions of the middle-class population whereas quantitative poverty analysis measures the extent of the poverty.
This stems from the view that there is a strong link between measurement and policy issues (Ravallion 1992). It is our conviction that "measurement" and "policy issues" are inseparable and should be treated as twins with equal weight.
To show the incidence and severity of poverty among the middle-class, both primary and secondary data were used. Unfortunately, there is a lack of secondary-documented data related to the middle class. To fill this gap, we had to rely on the primary data collected from the field using a core questionnaire. Our questionnaire was designed to provide statistical information on the middle class households' demographic composition, income and expenditure, consumption, socio-economic changes and how they responded to their environment and the state's economic policies. For this, our reference person was the head of the household who is the breadwinner and bondsman of the family as is customary in the Sudanese society.
The target group of the study was the intermediate strata which are one of the vulnerable groups that need to be protected. Also within these strata, a great attention was given in this study to the salaried groups. The fieldwork was conducted in Greater Khartoum because of the concentration of the public sector institutions, which are the largest employers of these strata.
Because the target population is very large, the multi-stage stratified sampling technique was used. Selection of the final sampling units passed through three main stages as follows:
(a) listing different institutions in the public sector, many of which were randomly selected;
(b) listing randomly selected departments within the sample institutions;
(c) categorising the structure of employees in each department according to occupation, as a stratification factor, from which the final sampling units were randomly selected proportionately.
The selected final sampling units were 250 cases of those who fell above [sic] Grade-9. Only 130 of the selected samples had actually responded, which in turn reflects their poverty.
