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Rural poverty in Gambia

In the Gambia, one of Africa's smallest and poorest countries, poverty is widespread, pervasive and predominantly rural. Half of the people living in rural areas are poor. Such factors as ethnicity or village size seem to be irrelevant to poverty, which is substantially uniform throughout the country, although pockets of deep poverty exist. In them live one third of all of the Gambia's rural poor people.

More than 90 per cent of extremely poor people in the country and more than 70 per cent of other poor people depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Every year poor people in rural areas face the so-called hungry season, a two-to-four-month period at the peak of the rainy season between July and September, when household food stocks are low. Poor households depend on income generated by groundnuts or other cash crops to cover the cost of school fees and medicines. Falling market prices mean that households have less money to meet basic needs.

The Gambia's rural poor people: who, where and why?

Groundnut farmers in upland areas are among the poorest people in the country.  At least half of the country's poor people include farmers and agricultural workers. The incidence of poverty is highest in rural groundnut producing areas. In the North Bank, Upper River and Lower River divisions, about 65 per cent of the population is poor.

Poverty is further complicated by the fact that the probability of a person's being poor is related to their sex. Compared to men, women have a higher incidence and severity of poverty. This relationship between gender and poverty is known as the feminization of poverty. Women are particularly vulnerable. Traditionally they do not own or control land, but they bear a disproportionately heavy burden of labour. They lack access to credit for income-generating activities, and they generally have no voice in the decisions that affect their lives.

Poverty in the Gambia has its roots in slow economic growth and uneven income distribution. Rural poverty, in particular, is the result of a poor natural resource base and farmers' dependence on groundnuts as their principal source of income.

The primary causes of rural poverty in the Gambia are:

• low and decreasing soil fertility
• low agricultural and labour productivity
• poor access to productive assets such as land and water
• poorly functioning input and output markets
• low prices on world markets for products such as groundnuts and certain types of rice
• poorly functioning rural institutions, including credit institutions, and lack of basic social services
• irregular rains that frequently cause crop losses, and yields that fluctuate as much as 40 per cent from one harvest to the next

Rural poor people generally produce for home consumption and sell any surpluses at disappointing prices. Poor farmers are caught in a vicious circle of risk aversion, limited use of inputs, low productivity and low income.

Source: IFAD