Citizens in 40 municipalities live below poverty line

Jordanians in 40 out of 101 of the country’s municipalities live below the poverty line despite an overall decline in national poverty levels over the past few years, according to a senior government official. Twenty of these municipalities, meanwhile, are considered extremely poor. “There are still 40 municipalities in Jordan where people live below the poverty line, and 20 of them registered the highest rate of poverty,” said Ministry of Social Development Secretary-General Mahmoud Alaymat at a recent lecture at the Jordanian University of Science and Technology. The 20 “very poor” municipalities include those in the governorates of Mafraq and Zarqa, north-east of Amman, some districts within the capital and certain municipalities along the Jordan Valley, explained Alaymat. In Jordan, the poverty line is equated with a yearly income of US $553 per capita. According to official data, the percentage of the population living at or under this figure is 14 percent, down from 21.3 percent in 1997. Poverty alleviation is a prominent feature of the so-called “National Agenda”, a wide-ranging blueprint for reform commissioned by King Abdullah II last November. According to the plan, the government will undertake a number of reforms in coming years in hopes of halving extreme poverty by 2015. As part of its drive to ease poverty, the government launched a Poverty Alleviation Strategy (PAS) in May 2002 to meet the needs of the kingdom’s roughly 800,000 poor. A number of initiatives were launched under the strategy, including investment plans, human-resources programmes and micro-credit projects aimed at kick-starting income-generating projects. Other examples of poverty-alleviation initiatives that have since been launched include the raising in 2003 of the minimum wage from the equivalent of US$113 to $120 per annum, the training of local community health and social workers, the provision of loans to 400 university students and the completion in 2004 of a survey aimed at providing low-income housing. Jordan’s National Human Development Report (NHDR), issued in 2004, made a number of further recommendations, including a suggestion that civil society representatives be included in government organs dealing with poverty issues. The NHDR also encourages civil society organisations to use their local knowledge to advise ministries on how programmes can be better tailored to meet the needs of the poor. Nevertheless, the latest poverty statistics suggest that much work still lies ahead. “In spite of the successes reached in poverty reduction,” Alaymat conceded, “we still have a lot to do.”