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In September 2016, ATD Fourth World and the University of Oxford launched a three-year participatory research project to examine and expand indicators that are used to measure poverty.

This video, made in August 2017, presents the beginning of the project and the work of peer groups (from similar environments) in Tanzania.

In this research project the voices of people who live in poverty count just as much as those of the university academics and other practitioners (teachers, social workers, etc.). Each of these groups has an extensive knowledge base. Yet each group needs the information and experience of the others in order to get a complete picture of poverty.

Working in peer groups allows the participants to express their ideas more freely. Each group describes their perception of poverty and ways to measure it. Each person can present a point of view about how to define and measure poverty. Then these perspectives are combined to get a more complete understanding that includes the views of those primarily concerned, people in poverty themselves.

This step is crucial for the development and implementation of public policies directed towards people living in poverty: policies often considered “for” them but not developed with them.

It is necessary to include the voices of people who have a direct experience of poverty in order to identify its causes and consequences and to create a realistic future. This video demonstrates how different ideas about the same theme can differ vastly and actually distort reality.

The men and women in the group who have direct experience with poverty agree unanimously that peace is a necessary condition for getting through the difficult challenges of poverty.

Vidéo made by Eva Njoki Munyiri