IRIN Focus on urban poverty

If you have the cash, it is possible to buy almost anything on the streets of Luanda. With remarkable ease, petty traders balance tins of sausages, buckets of bread, even piles of jeans on their head. Agile young men dart through traffic jams with heavy sacks full of soft-drinks, piles of newspapers and grey tool boxes. Shoeless children wave cartons of cigarettes at smoking drivers or maybe an old Portuguese dictionary. The myriad hawkers are testimony to Angola’s high unemployment levels. In urban areas, it’s estimated that between 60 to 70 percent of people are unemployed or under-employed. The only way to survive is to try and sell small goods or bargain for an hour’s labour. Car-cleaning is a popular survival method, although it rarely pays well. “I can get 2.5 kwanzas or sometimes 5 kwanzas for washing a car,” says Miguel, aged 20, who has a ‘patch’ outside the ministry of education and culture. “People from the ministry pay less. If I get a foreigner it’s better. Sometimes they pay 20 kwanzas.” The exchange rate is roughly 11 kwanzas to the US dollar. Miguel is married and has a one-year-old child. He lives in Bairro da Madeira, close to the city centre, with his mother, wife and daughter. Their one-bedroom house is made from a mix of mud and cement bricks and has a corrugated iron roof. They have no running water but they do have electricity. Like many Angolans in Luanda, Miguel rigged up a wire to a mains cable. Miguel’s wife sells beer. For every crate she sells, she makes 50 kwanzas. Together, they earn about 450 kwanzas in “a good month”: Not enough to feed and clothe a family beyond the bare minimum in a city rated as one of the world’s most expensive. “Poverty is when you can’t afford school, you can’t afford clothes and you can’t afford food,” he says. “I’m very poor and things here are very expensive. We need 150 kwanzas a week to eat.” Decades of war, bad governance and spiralling inflation have combined with over-crowding to create a city of stark poverty. Up to a third of Angola’s estimated population of 11 million is crammed into the capital, originally designed for only 800,000 people. Living standards are at a bare minimum. In urban areas, it’s estimated that 70 percent of people’s income is swallowed up on food costs. Most people, like Miguel, cannot afford to eat more than one meal a day. “Today, the average family have at most one meal, sometimes nothing,” says one senior development worker who has lived in Angola for many years. “In the early eighties, the poor ate two, if not three meals a day.” Street children, normally boys, are a visible indicator of the extent to which families cannot afford to feed every member adequately. They hang around restaurants, hotels, offices and apartment blocks. They tend to operate in groups, often with a leader. “The number of street kids is increasing all the time,” comments Maura McCarthy, acting field director of GOAL, an Irish non-governmental organisation. “Often they are abandoned by displaced families who have come from the provinces where there is chronic poverty.” McCarthy says Luanda provides “a way out” for these children. The city provides opportunities like shoe-shining, car cleaning and, inevitably, crime. “If children are left to their own devices they become more inclined to hard-core crime. We’ve seen it in other countries and it will probably increase here with time,” she says. But even for those Angolans who earn a regular salary in dollars, life is not easy. Eighteen-year-old Katy works as an ‘empregada’, a domestic, for an expatriate couple. Twice a week, she spends the morning cleaning the couple’s flat for US $100 a month. Katy says this is “a generous wage” compared to most domestics. It’s also higher than the salary her sister receives as a full-time secretary for a general from Angola’s Armed Forces. “My sister earns less than US $100 a month but she works much more,” says Katy. “But neither of us have a sufficient salary. I have four younger sisters too but only me and my big sister work. My father also has a job. Together, we earn more or less enough to eat, enough to survive.” Katy lives in Bairro Popular, a run-down neighbourhood on the east side of town. Her house, she says, has no running water, no electricity. Katy shares one bedroom with four of her sisters, who are all at school. Katy stopped going to school two years ago because her father did not have enough money. Nevertheless, she wants to be a lawyer. “My wish is to become a lawyer,” she says. “Rights exist here a bit but we don’t have the right to do what we want or be what we want. I have to be a cleaner to save up some money to go back to school. I think it will take me a year to save up. Meanwhile, she is training to be a cook in case she never achieves her dream. “Cooking is security,” according to Katy. The cooking course costs US $25 each month. Every day, she spends 10 kwanzas on transport. Each week, she puts 100 kwanzas towards the family food allowance. Rarely does she buy clothes. If anyone in the family becomes sick, it is another financial demand that sometimes cannot be met. This week, the state-owned daily newspaper, ‘Jornal de Angola’, reported that “the cost of living is rising”. The newspaper said that the price of clothes and shoes had risen the most. Since June, according to the National Institute of Statistics, medical costs have increased by 13.4 percent and drink and tobacco by 9.6 percent. However, the newspaper also stated that inflation is slowing down. In June, it stood at 6.7 percent, a 21.7 percent drop from the month before. Notably, on Friday, the government announced that false kwanzas are circulating in Luanda and warned people against changing money on the street. Few Angolans will take the warning seriously. “It’s well-known that the government says this every so often to try and curb inflation,” said an economic analyst employed by a foreign oil company in Luanda. “The aim is to get all the kwanzas off the street, out of unofficial traders’ hands, and into the banks.”