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Horace Otieno investigates: What is the root cause of our poverty? and How can we empower our Hope Rootz members impactfully?

Janet Feldman, Posina Venkata Rayudu, Marcus Petz, Andrius Kulikauskas are assisting him.

Investigating poverty

Formulating questions that interest us

  • What is poverty? (Marcus)
  • How can we combat it? (Marcus)
    • How can we, as individuals, meaningfully respond to other people's poverty? (Andrius)
    • How can we, as individuals, our own poverty? (Andrius)

Seeking answers

Collecting personal stories of poverty and ways of combating.

I note that Andrius Kulikauskas mentions collecting stories from people around poverty as a way to advance Horace Otieno's investigation.

This is a commonly used technique in social science called Narrative Analysis or Narrative Inquiry:

https://deakin.libguides.com/qualitative-study-designs/narrative-inquiry

Tells something about it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_inquiry

Gives a history and explains different perspectives.

IF you do decide to follow this idea Horace Otieno- please note some important aspects -

1. Ask people to consent to share the story - and give them a choice of

A. Anonymity - only you record some details of the person e.g. a divorced woman aged 34 with 3 children who lives in a small village B. Pseudoanonymity - you make up a useful name so you can identify them later (but do not make that public) e.g. Ogwang said, when the person is really called Odere. C. Public - they agree to use their real / official name and so they are credited for what they say.

You need to also allow them to see the interview / survey data / story or narrative AFTER the interview. They get a kind of copy approval - so if they think you have got something wrong you can correct it.

It is a good idea to ask how long you can keep the info and what you can do with it. It is a good idea to get this in writing (on a consent sheet) or if an oral interview (and recorded) is needed to get them to say it. So they might say - you are free to put my interview in a public database so anyone can read it who is a researcher BUT I want my name listed on that place. If you think that the data will harm them then you as the researcher do NOT HAVE to publish their name or identifying information.

SO for example there is this open database with research on Poverty where you can deposit and also find some research relevant to your investigation:

https://www.fsd.tuni.fi/en/data/by-theme/poverty/

And there is a guide here

https://www.fsd.tuni.fi/fi/tietoarkisto/materiaalipankki/tietoarkisto_yleisesite2015_ENG_netti.pdf

I have used this database myself in research and it is based in the city where I live at Tampere University

I can help you to do this research. You will need a semi-structured questionnaire, so it asks questions that people talk about but you can digress a bit around the topic. You also need to be careful that they say things and are not given leading questions by yourself. AND know that people get details wrong and do not know and can be embarrassed to say. So it is also good if they have time to think about things.

You can also cover this topic with a discussion or focus group with several people talking around the issue e.g. saying that a friend or someone they know had this experience rather than it being personalised to them.

I also wonder if you have some thoughts on the Jewish view of poverty - does this exist? Is there a charity connection? Is poverty ONLY an individual's responsibility or is there a community aspect to it (OK leading question I obviously think the community matters too!)

I also recall from Minicui sodas days Janet you wrote " "women" as a population--as well as youth--are what I would most like to focus on myself in any work I do on this, made easier because KAIPPG in large part serves women (a large number being farmers and HIV/AIDS-related widows)." - so it can be good to give a women's dimension to poverty too.

I saw this: https://www.vegaslegalmagazine.com/what-is-a-wife-worth-economic-damages/ and it seems very oriented to how men value women - rather than how women might value women. However, it does indicate that women are undervalued and under accounted for. So is this a kind of poverty?

Can we also talk about food poverty? Is it the same? Is it linked to emotional, relationship, community etc. poverties - do they co-occur?

From these ideas we might expand on poverty and different religious and intellectual traditions around poverty.

ALL this is useful to the syntropic finance idea I am working on - so if we can talk about POVERTY being the baseline state in which higher levels are developed we might have some indicators e.g. from a multiple capitals approach how to identify poverty and spot how we get to the next level - which I have called DEPENDENCY. (all this is at an early stage of theoretical development - so I value your input and ideas around it).

Applying what we learn

Poverty as a state in Syntropic Finance

A state of poverty is the beginning state from which economic capability and capacity can start to be built to lead to economic dependency as a first trophic level in SyntroFi.

Messages

Andrius: Marcus, I added some questions and structured this page. Is that all right? Change it as you think best or let's simply keep working on it.

Marcus: Horace should do this with our help.