Browsing by Subject "poverty"

Streaming, also referred to as vlogging, is the act of providing real-time video content over the internet. This activity encompasses numerous sub-genres such as video gaming and irl (”in real life”). Degenerate streaming is a new sub-genre often consisting of belligerent public behavior and drug abuse. Streamers sometimes receive monetary donations for their efforts from their audience. The actors taking part in this variety of streaming can be said to embody features of an antihero, a concept appearing in literature since antiquity. An antihero is a central character in a work of fiction who often lacks moral fortitude, resorting to dubious behavioral patterns in order to reach their goals. A dark triad personality is used in scientific literature to describe individuals with a history of psychopathic, opportunistic (i.e. Machiavellian), and narcissistic characteristics. This study frames the public personas of Finnish degenerate streamers as antiheroes in the context of the dark triad personality; their public communications are also analyzed within this framework. The topic is approached using a qualitative data-analysis of a total of 24 hours of degenerate streaming as well as with character typologies. The data-set consists of material created by five individual streamers. The main themes found in this material are identified and further categorized into sub-themes. In the analysis section of this study the life histories and potential root causes of degenerate streamers are discussed; a poor economical standing and mental health issues were identified as contributing factors. Some correlations with Finnish public political discourse are also suggested. This thesis contains descriptions of potentially upsetting events, such as domestic violence.

Street children is a broad topic that has been studied by various researchers often focusing on some more specific part, for example street life and activities in the street. In the previous years, the voices of the children themselves have been increasingly taken into account. In this study the focus is on the ways of helping the children and how to support them to get out of the street. The aim is to find the best practices to support the children and to see if the strategies of the centres meet the needs of the children. Therefore, it is important to study why the children have ended up in the street at the first place and what kind of survival strategies they have. Also the reasons for them to run away back to the street again are discussed. The study is an ethnographic case study. The methods used for data collection were interviews and participant observation. The field study was conducted in Lusaka, Zambia, in three different centres for street children. Some participant observation was done in the street too. For clarity’s sake the perceptions of the children and the strategies of the centres are analysed and discussed in different chapters. The findings show that there are various push factors for children ending up in the street, for example poverty and violence at home. Also not having anywhere to go to and the need to survive are pushing children to the street. Running away from the centres is linked to violence but also to freedom, addiction to drugs and alcohol as well as peer pressure. In the street the most usual activity is begging, which is considered as a mean of survival. Aside of begging, children do different kinds of piece works. Street life is hard and unsafe: there is violence, hunger, theft and addiction to glue and drugs. The friends in the street were seen as an important thing in order to survive. Among the children, the centres are generally considered as a good way to get out of the street, alongside education. However, the violence used in some centres is criticised and the child’s willingness to go to the centre is considered as important. Children who are willing to come to the centres can be found through street outreach. From the point of view of the centre staff children working and staying in the street is problematic because these children are deprived of their rights, for example right to education. Often the children do have parents or relatives but they are working in the street in order to support the families. The domestic work is considered as a normal thing whereas the work in the street is seen as abuse and exploitation. Sometimes the parents even send the children to the street to earn money. Work in the street often prevents the children from going to school but sometimes the work can help them to afford going to school. However, children working in the street are often taken advantage of. Both the street life and the work in the street has a lot of consequences for the child’s health and well-being, both physical and psychological. Despite the hardships in the street, there is also friends, belonging and freedom. A simple solution to tackle the street child phenomenon is to stop giving money to the children in the street and direct them to the facilities, where they can obtain education and life skills. The staff of the centres have a consensus of home being the best place for the child. The children’s perceptions are somewhat similar to the strategies of the centres when discussing the best ways to help the children. One simple solution is to stop giving the children money in the street. For the child to integrate to the society he/she needs a place he/she can consider as home, family or guardians, rehabilitation and education. Also the government’s intervention would be important in order to support the families to get help from the social welfare and to send the children to school. This study contributes to the discussion of street children, their lives in the street and how to help them, both from the point of views of the children and the staff of the centres.

Disability and poverty are tightly interlinked, but disability inclusion often remains on the sidelines of poverty reduction programmes. Abilis Foundation supports organisations of persons with disabilities in developing countries, and income generation and poverty reduction projects are one of its key thematic areas. The objective of this study, commissioned by Abilis Foundation, is to evaluate the effectiveness and sustainability of Abilis funded income generation projects in Sierra Leone, and to identify the factors influencing the livelihoods of persons with disabilities in Sierra Leone. The primary data consists of semi-structured interviews and a focus group discussion with adult persons with disabilities who had participated in Abilis funded income generation projects between 2015–2018. Discussions with other relevant informants and data from the project documents were included in the analysis to strengthen the validity of the results. The analysis follows qualitative content analysis principles. All income generating activities supported in the sample projects were still on-going during the time of study, even though most businesses continued to be very small-scale. The results indicate that limited financial assets (resulting in, inter alia, lack of equipment and materials) and strong competition restrain persons with disabilities from expanding their businesses. Social assets and education support their livelihood opportunities but are only useful when other factors enable people to draw on their social and human assets as well. Widespread poverty affects all aspects of life in Sierra Leone, and persons with disabilities are even more vulnerable because they are often socially marginalized and face widespread discrimination that restrains their access to assets and restricts their participation in economic activities, decision-making, and social life in general. It is essential to consider context-specific local characteristics, target beneficiaries, and market dynamics when planning poverty reduction programmes and livelihood activities. Successful poverty reduction efforts must consider aspects beyond mere income generation. Key elements for successful poverty reduction and livelihood programmes include enhancing the opportunities of persons with disabilities to adopt diverse livelihood strategies, empowerment of persons with disabilities to have their voices heard and to gain control in their own lives, and promoting security and appropriate coping mechanisms to reduce vulnerability and to increase their resilience.

Ending poverty is a moral and ethical aim, and living without poverty is one of the human rights. To eradicate poverty, the reliable practice of measuring poverty is needed. Poverty measures are required to identify the poor people, overview the incidence of poverty and track progress of policies. This study examines the hybrid poverty line and asks how it differs from the conventional approach to measure extreme poverty globally. Additionally, this study reviews how the global poverty counts evolve with this novel poverty line. This thesis comprises a comprehensive review of the relevant literature. Measuring poverty is essentially based on how welfare is defined. In poverty analysis, consumption and income are used as indicators of welfare. The poor people are identified with the appropriate poverty line, the absolute or relative poverty line. These two approaches have very different conclusions about the economic welfare: relative incomes in a society do not matter for welfare at all or relative incomes are the only thing that matters. When the poor people are identified, a poverty index is needed to aggregate the overall incidence of poverty. The hybrid poverty line consists of the absolute poverty line expressing a lower bound of the poverty measure and the weakly relative poverty line as an upper bound giving a limit of the weight of relative deprivation rising with the mean consumption. The results say that the estimates of the global poverty rate show a slower pace of reduction compared with the conventional approach, likely due to a rising count of relative poverty worldwide. This study broadens our understanding how the chosen poverty line affects the incidence of poverty rates. This study emphasizes the importance of re-evaluating poverty measurement practices, particularly in the context of developing countries experiencing economic growth. As absolute poverty lines may lose meaning as a result of economic development, it is necessary to develop measures that account for the relative dimensions of poverty following the increasing standards of living.

This thesis explores the link between South-South remittance and development. It attempts to establish improved understanding about the role of immigrants as agents of constituency growth and development. By doing so, it illuminates the dark corners of the policy implications that the unconventional development agency of immigrants might have for countries in the Organization ft Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The thesis problematises the existence of state-centric international cooperation as providing the recipe for failed Aid in the face of global poverty menace. In the last half a century, the relative shi of focus to non-state actors brought about the proliferation of NGOs. That, intrun, helped improve international access to crisis situations; however, their long-term remedial impacts on poverty and development have been contested. Major misgivings for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are, on one hand, low level goal-bound expenditures and lack of independence from influence of the state, on the other. Therefore, the thesis enterprises to empirically verify its fundamental question whether remitting immigrants constitute an alternative development agency to the traditional players: the State and NGOs. Its main arguments are: due to states failures in bringing sustainable development in many countries of the South, the future of poverty reduction and development also rests in immigrants remittances. Nonetheless, in the last decade, remittance security-nexus dominated its discourse. Because of that remittance was viewed as something requiring global regime and restrictions. These temptations to tightly regulate remittance flows carry the danger of overlooking its trans-boundary nature and its strong link with livelihood of the poor. Therefore, to avoid unintended consequences of interventions, there need to be clear policy that bases itself on a discursive knowledge on the issues of North-South and South-South remittances The study involved both literature based and empirical research. It employed Discourse Analysis (C as main method for the former and snow-balling as its approach for the latter. For the first part the thesis constructed three conceptual models, these are: metrological model, police model and ecological model on remittance development-nexus. Through this modeling, the thesis achieved better deconstruction on the concepts remittance, immigrants and development agency. The protagonists of each model, the values and interests they represent, and their main arguments along various lines of dichotomies have been discussed. For instance, the main treats of meteorological model include: it sees remittance as transitional economic variable which require constant speculations and global management; it acts as meteorological station for following up or predicting the level, direction, flow and movement of global remittance. It focuses on official lines and considers the state as legitimate recipient of advic and positive consequence of remittance. On the other hand, police model views remittance as beir at best, development neutral or as an illicit activity requiring global regulations and tight control. Both immigrants and remittance viewed as subversive to establishments. It gives primacy to state stable agent of development and a partner for international cooperation. The anti-thesis to the police model is supplied by ecological model, which this thesis is a part. Ecological model on remittance and immigrants argues that, tight global regulations alone cannot be a panacea for possible abuse of informal remittance system. Ecological model, not only links remittance to poverty reduction, the main trust of development, but also considers the development agency of immigrants as critical factor for 21st century north-south development intervention. It sees immigrants as development conscious and their remittance instrument as most stable flow of finance to the developing countries. Besides, it sees remittance as effective poverty solutions than Foreign Direct Investment and international AID. This thesis focuses on the significance of South-South remittance and investigates the South Africa - Ethiopia remittance corridor, as case study; and empirically verifies the role of Ethiopian (Kembata and Hadiya) immigrants in South Africa as agents of local development back home. The study involved techniques of interview, group discussions, observations and investigative study. It also looked into the determinants of their migration to South Africa, and their remittance to Ethiopia. The theoretical models in the first part of the thesis have been operationalised throughout the empirical part to verify if the Kembata and Hadiya immigrants played the crucial role in their household poverty and local development in comparison with the Ethiopian state and the NGOs involved in the system. As evidenced by the research the thesis has made three distinct contributions to the discourse of remittance development-nexus. Fist, it systematized the debate about linkages between remittance, immigrants, development agency and policy of international cooperation by creating three conceptual models (school of thoughts); second, it singled out remitting immigrants as new agents of development in the South; third, it deconstructed concept of remittance and established South-South remittance as additional sphere of academic investigation. In addition to the above contributions, the thesis finds that Kembata and Hadiya immigrants have engaged in various developmental activities in their locality than usually anticipated. Hence, it concludes that Ethiopian immigrants constitute an alternative development agency to the state and other non-state actors in their country, and the lesson can be applied to poverty reduction strategies in most developing countries.

This study seeks to comparatively analyse how well-being is distributed across the social structure in European welfare regimes. Welfare regime refers to a group of countries having a relatively similar orientation and culture regarding social policy. Well-being is interpreted and operationalised as a multidimensional concept. More concretely, well-being is approached in terms of the traditional core areas of welfare and social policy (indicators: economic hardship, sickness) but a special emphasis is piaced upon social aspects of life (indicators: social relations, social contribution, local ties, recognition and societal pessimism). The perspective of vulnerable social positions (unemployment, poverty, immigration background etc.) is chosen in all the analyses. The data set of the European Social Survey (round 3, 2006/2007) is used in the study since it includes an extensive module on well-being, which enables convenient and fruitful analytical paths. Multilevel analysis is chosen as the key method for the study due to its ability to handle data that involve grouped observations (e.g. individuals in countries) and research questions that are of multilevel nature themselves. The overall methodological idea is to start from general and broad descriptions and move towards a narrower and more specific focus. Four indicators are chosen for the in-depth analysis: economic hardship, sickness, societal pessimism and recognition. The results mostly corroborate the view that well-being is to a significant extent conditioned by the position one occupies in the social structure and also by the welfare regime one lives in. How life chances are distributed across the social structure varies between the country groups due to their different approaches to welfare policy. The Eastern European country group is generally characterised by relatively frequent ill-being — lack of well-being — on almost all dimensions included in the analysis. Economic hardship is conspicuousiy prevalent in these nations, especially among the unemployed. In fact, unemployment is a major risk factor for economic hardship in all regimes. The Nordic regime is distinguished by low rates of ill-being in virtually all dimensions, but the relatively high sickness rate is an exception: poverty in particular exposes to sickness in the Nordic world of welfare. The link between vulnerability and societal pessimism is rather typical for both the Eastern European and Continental European regimes. Poverty makes future views bleaker in almost ali country groups, whereas immigrants are generally less pessimistic. However, in the Nordic regime immigration background seems to be an adverse factor with respect to well-being. Poverty, unemployment and oneliness are associated to low recognition, whereas old age seems to be related to more respectful treatment. Living in the liberal welfare regime and being poor or unemployed is the combination that most severely exposes its occupant to the demoralising expetiences of low recognition. In other words, the moral flavour of everyday life in a vulnerable social position differs by country groups. Welfare regimes are more than just systems of benefit allocation and service production - also culture matters.