Differences in Household Composition: Hidden Dimensions of Poverty and Displacement in Somalia
Hanmer, L., Rubiano-Matulevich, E., Santamaria, J.
Little is known about how gender inequality influences poverty rates among people who have been forcibly displaced. Decades of conflict and instability has led to over 2.5 million people being displaced within Somalia by conflict alone and many other are displaced by droughts or climate shocks. A newly available nationally representative survey data for Somalia enable us to compare poverty rates for internally displaced persons (IDPs) with the poverty of other Somalians. We apply a feminist approach to capture the disruption to household structures and barriers to access economic opportunities that result from displacement. Most people in Somalia are poor but rates are highest for IDPs. Among both displaced and non-displaced Somali households male-headed households are poorer than female-headed households (65 percent compared with 70 percent). However, we find that distinguishing between types of households according to their demographic characteristics and the number and gender income earners provides more valuable insights into the poverty risk faced by displaced households than analysis based on the gender of the household head alone. For example, IDP households with a female single caregiver living outside settlements have much higher poverty rates than female caregivers who have not been displaced (93 percent compared to 80 percent). In contrast, in IDP settlements, couples with children have the highest poverty rate, 84 percent are poor compared with 67 percent of female single caregivers. We find that the risk of experiencing poverty significantly decreases with the number of income earners; this risk reduction is particularly marked for displaced households, both inside and outside settlements. For settlement IDPs, living in households with several female earners is associated with a lower poverty risk than living in a household with a male breadwinner or multiple male earners. In contrast, for the non-displaced, more male earners are associated with a lower poverty risk