Post by Lara
5 January 2013
We listen to the BBC radio a lot here, and because 2012 was
an election year, Sierra Leone featured rather prominently in African news, as
did the reminder that Sierra Leone is home to a significant population of
people living on “less than US $1.25 per day” (In 2004, the estimate was that
70% of the population lived below this line, according to the CIA fact book.
More recent figures seem to be closer to 50%).
$1.25 per day is the internationally accepted threshold of extreme
poverty, according to Global Basic Income Foundation’s website, which gives an
overview of how poverty is defined worldwide.
The first time I heard this figure was sometime in the 1990s when I
believe the threshold was $1.00 per day. I remember at the time not being able
to wrap my mind around how a person can live on such a small amount. Now that I am living and working in Sierra
Leone, undoubtedly crossing paths with people who live below that threshold
every day, I have a better understanding of what it means to live below the
international poverty line.
 |
| Lots of fresh produce at this "supermarket" -- but there's no frozen food section. |
I should mention before I delve into the financial realities
in Sierra Leone that Gallup’s most recent numbers for daily consumer spending
in the US are between $70 and $80. This figure does not include buying a house
or car or paying recurring utilities. I’m not sure whether similar spending is
included in the “$1.25 per day” figure, but either way the contrast is still
evident between average daily spending for Americans and Sierra Leoneans.
$1.25 is roughly equivalent to 5500 Leones (or Le 5500). According
to the Global Basic Income Foundation, this figure includes not only the amount
of money available to people to spend, but the value of what they produce,
which is to say that subsistence farmers may have significantly less cash in
hand because the value of the products they raise is included in the
figure. Pair the Le 5500 with the fact
that most households that we know have at least 5 members, and the total is Le
27,500 daily. To illustrate the approximate cost of making a meal here, below I
listed the ingredients of cassava leaf plassas and rice, a common dish. In our observations, families tend to make
rice and plassas once per day, and eat it in several sittings throughout the
day. In addition to this, they may make pap (hot cereal) or eat fruit, gari
(dried cassava root), or peanuts throughout the day. The breakdown below shows how much you would
pay to buy everything for cassava leaf in the market, though most families will
raise crops, fish, or sell palm oil and not have to buy all of the ingredients
from someone else.
Product
|
Price per unit
|
Units
|
Total
|
Rice
|
Le 1000
|
5
|
Le 5000
|
Palm oil
|
Le
2000
|
1
|
Le
2000
|
Cassava Leaves
|
Le 200
|
1
|
Le 200
|
Fish
|
Le
2000
|
1
|
Le
2000
|
Beans
|
Le 500
|
1
|
Le 500
|
Ground Peanuts
|
Le
1000
|
1
|
Le
1000
|
Spices
|
Le 700
|
1
|
Le 700
|
Total:
|
|
|
Le
11,400
|
 |
| The price of palm oil can be an economic indicator |
As you see, the estimated cost of cooking a meal for a
family of 5 is under Le 12,000. This leaves about Le 15,500 for the cost of
everything else in a day—healthcare, education, clothing, transportation,
etc.
I was not able to locate a breakdown of consumer spending in
Sierra Leone, though I did find a 2010 breakdown of US annual consumer
spending, and found that US consumer spending is roughly 48% housing, 13% food,
16% transportation, 6% healthcare, 5% entertainment, 3% clothing and services,
and 10% “everything else” (
http://www.netpaths.net/blog/where-does-all-our-money-go/).
Solely based on my own experience and observations, I feel that a summary of
where Sierra Leoneans spend money would show a higher percentage spent on food
and a lower percentage spent on housing and healthcare.
 |
| How much would you be willing to pay for a seat in this vehicle? |
When comparing lifestyles in the US and Sierra Leone, one
thing to note is that most goods and services cost a lot less here than in the
states. For example, going to see a live soccer match usually costs Le
1000-5000 ($ 0.23-1.12). Going to watch a movie or a televised soccer match
costs Le 1000 ($ 0.23). A 350 mL bottle
of Coke or Fanta costs Le 2000-3000 ($ 0.45-0.68). A sandwich of bean patties with onions on it
or two fried donuts costs Le 1000 ($0.23) Most people I know do not pay rent
for their housing, and many people built their houses themselves with little to
no money (handmade mud bricks plus “free” labor from family).
Beyond the difference in the spending power of a dollar
there and here, “utilities” are highly uncommon here in Sierra Leone. In
Freetown, Bo, and Kenema, power grids exist and consumers can have their houses
connected and pay for their usage. Just about everywhere else that I know of,
electricity is provided by individual generators run by gas or diesel, solar
power systems, and batteries. Sewage,
trash collection, and running water are not available in most places in the
country either. Even when these services
do exist, many places in the country work on a pay-as-you-go basis [think of
cell phones that you can add minutes to and use until the minutes are done.
That’s not only how cell phones work here but also internet and electricity
from the grid]. What this means is that
families may choose to top-up their card for electricity near a holiday or when
they are going to throw a party, and run the power until the credits are gone,
and then wait to buy more credits for a while.
Living without electricity to your house may sound
incredibly difficult, but most daily activities here do not require
electricity, and battery-powered lights and radios provide enough power to work
at night and listen to the local radio station. Small businesses and NGOs run
generators and charge a fee to plug in your cell phone, DVD player, computer,
or car battery. This way, even without a
grid providing power to your house, you can own and make use of these
products. Also, so far the coldest
temperature we have recorded here was 68 degrees Fahrenheit, and while the highest
temperatures are nothing short of miserable, Sierra Leoneans tend to rest
during the hottest parts of the day and do most of their work in the early
morning and evening, when the heat isn’t as oppressive. Thus, heating and air conditioning are not considered
necessary.
 |
| Without street lights and lit-up houses all over, the skyline sure is dark. |
Another point of disparity between US consumer spending and
Sierra Leonean spending is that refrigerators and freezers are not a common
household appliance, and the ones that do exist are often used to keep bugs out
of stored foods. The rare refrigerators
and freezers that are plugged in are used mainly to keep drinks cold or foods
frozen for transport before being sold. There are no goods available in our
town that require refrigerating or freezing. The only dairy products are
powdered or canned milk. Meat is frozen
until sold or dried, and fish is either freshly caught or dried. Think of your average American shopping list
and remove everything that needs to be kept cold, and the list as well as the
cost of the groceries has shrunk significantly.
Ultimately, I find it difficult to think in terms of
comparisons between my daily spending habits here and in the US, because so
many things are so different. Here, the
cost of local goods and services is so much lower we sometimes feel that local business people must be losing money in their endeavors, and at the same time
the price of imported or non-local goods can be so exorbitant that the majority
of the population wouldn’t even consider buying them. A lot of this discrepancy, it seems, comes
from a lack of interest in non-local goods and a disinclination to allow the
price of local goods to rise with time.
For example, rice is Le 1000 per cup. Last year, it was the same. Next
year, it’ll be the same. Ten years ago,
it was Le 700 per cup, and people are still complaining about the rise in
price. Undoubtedly, the profit margin of
people selling rice is lower now than it was when the price first climbed from
Le 700 to Le 1000, but it will probably have to drop to the point that sellers
are losing money before the price will rise again.
 |
| It's possible only some of these goods bring in a profit for this local seller |
As another example, we watched the neighbor girls make
butterscotch (toffee candies) to sell in the market. Curious as to what they
were getting out of it, we did the math. They put Le 13,000 into buying
supplies, and then spent 3 hours making the candies. They sell them for Le 100 (the
smallest coin in wide circulation) each, which requires at least one girl to
spend a day walking through the market selling. If they sell all of the candies
they made [which they inevitably do not], they will make about Le 15,000 at a
profit margin of Le 2000 ($ 0.45). Divided by 4 girls who spent a collective
20+ hours in the endeavor, each girl makes about 25 Leones, or half a penny,
per hour. Unfortunately, if they go to
the market selling their candies at double the price, they will likely not sell
anything because other girls are selling candies for Le 100 each.
We are not personally living below the “$1.25 a day”
threshold, though I think that we could do so in Sierra Leone and still have
enough to eat. It would mostly affect our ability to consume “luxury” items
such as soft drinks, beer, snack foods, and pricier goods in the market like
lobster and chicken. Living below $1.25
per day would also significantly impair our ability to travel—from our town it
costs a minimum of Le 8000 to pay for transport anywhere, significantly more to
go to Bo or Freetown. From what I can tell,
the difference between living below the poverty line and above it is mobility
and consumption of non-local goods. We
spend very little money when we stay in our town, but we always indulge a bit
when we’re in Bo or Freetown, buying imported goods and eating Western food in
restaurants rather than cooking rice for ourselves (and yes, that means ice
cream). Also, we came here with some
electronic goods that might be considered prohibitively expensive here—our
solar cell phone/iPod charger that cost US $100, our $200 netbook, iPods, and
kindles. Once you have them here they
cost about as much as a cell phone to charge and maintain, but few people we
know would be able to buy these goods outright, even at the cost in the US
which is usually less than what the same product would cost here.
As I said before, the first time I learned that a
significant portion of the world’s population lives on such a small amount of
money each day, I couldn’t fathom how it was possible. Now after living in one of the poorest
countries on Earth for several months, I see people getting by every day, and I
have a better understanding of what poverty means. Here in my community,
poverty does not mean starving to death or going without clothing or shelter.
Poverty means not having money to travel, pay school fees, pay for internet
usage, afford reliable health care, or buy books. It does not mean not having a cell phone, but
it might mean not having enough money to buy minutes or charge the battery. I find myself oscillating between two
thoughts: one, that people in my community who live below the poverty threshold
can make that $1.25 go a lot further than someone in the US would be able to;
and two, that living below that threshold is incredibly limiting to my fellow
community members as far as their upward mobility is concerned. Simply put, one can get by here on less than
$1.25 per day, but one cannot thrive on so little—to be able to educate your
children, afford a generator or solar system to power your house, travel to
other cities to buy and sell goods, and pay for more than the basic food and
household goods that the market offers, one needs more than $1.25 daily.
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| Subsistence farming tends to help secure food here, but relying on your own harvest brings risks |
Recently, the BBC has been reporting that Keep a Child
Alive, an international charity devoted to ending poverty and protecting
children in poor countries, has released a report stating that with
international support, extreme poverty could be eliminated within one
generation. For my part, I hope this is
an achievable goal, and that my students, neighbors, friends, and family here
in Sierra Leone have a brighter future ahead of them.
Below are links to the sources I consulted writing this
article. I am in no way an expert on international poverty or economics. The article reflects my own opinions and
observations, and not necessarily those of any of the below references.
