There is by now ample evidence that the poor lack access to basic financial services. It is, therefore, no surprise that financial inclusion has become a focus of attention for development professionals seeking to alleviate poverty around the world. However, the nature of poverty and deprivation, the livelihood, and the financial needs of the poor vary widely across different contexts. In India...

Introduction: Approximately 20% of healthcare workers in high-income countries such as Australia, Canada and the USA work in rural areas. Healthcare workers are known to be vulnerable to occupational injury and poor work disability outcomes; given their rural–urban distribution, it is possible to compare work disability prevention in rural and urban areas. However, little attention has been pai...

On-site sanitation is the main form of excreta disposal in most sub-Saharan African cities and will remain the most appropriate level of service for the urban poor in the medium term. Despite heavy public investment in sewerage systems in most primary and some secondary cities, typically only 10-15% of the urban population benefit from access to the sewer network. About 80% of the urban populat...

Although the work of William Julius Wilson has done much to shed light on the role that social capital, or the lack thereof, has played in perpetuating joblessness among the urban poor, major gaps remain. Specifically, research in the urban poverty literature has almost exclusively theorized and measured social capital in terms of the poor’s network structure and composition. Thus, it is widely...

Family planning programmes are costly to implement, so it is critical to determine their effect. This study uses a quasi-experimental design to determine the impact of new family planning clinics on knowledge, contraceptive use and unmet need for family planning, amongst married women in urban poor areas of six secondary cities of Pakistan. Baseline (n=5,338) and end-line (n=5,502) population s...

Although the urbanisation process is widely acknowledged to be associated with increasing levels of national production and higher levels of per capita GDP, poverty remains a persistent feature of urban life in India, both in terms of income and immigrants’ living conditions. Economic growth in cities has been found to be insufficient to achieve poverty alleviation. Government action has focuse...

Due to the inherent discrete nature of sensing, interpolation is a key activity in sensing. Interpolation in urban computing faces an unprecedented inference issue that was not present in large scale traditional sensing environments. Obstacles such as buildings and walls are prevalent in urban sensing, and it is important to consider them in urban sensing interpolation. This paper introduces an...

Although many low-income urban areas are highly walkable by conventional measures such as population density or land use mix, chronic diseases related to lack of physical activity are more common among residents of these areas. Disparities in neighborhood conditions may make poor areas less attractive environments for walking, offsetting the advantages of density and land use mix. This study co...

Poor breastfeeding practices are widely documented in Kenya, where only a third of children are exclusively breastfed for 6 months and only 2% in urban poor settings. This study aimed to better understand the factors that contribute to poor breastfeeding practices in two urban slums in Nairobi, Kenya. In-depth interviews (IDIs), focus group discussions (FGDs) and key informant interviews (KIIs)...

BACKGROUND Rapid urban population growth is of global concern as it is accompanied with several new health challenges. The urban poor who reside in informal settlements are more vulnerable to these health challenges. Lack of formal government public health facilities for the provision of health care is also a common phenomenon among communities inhabited by the urban poor. To help ameliorate th...