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Urbanization, urban poverty, and inequalities are universal phenomena. Most scholars conceptualize urban poverty with income poverty accompanied by the problems associated with reliance on the cash economy; overcrowded living conditions (slums); environmental hazard (stemming from density and hazardous place of settlements, and exposure to multiple pollutants); social fragmentation (lack of community and inter-household mechanisms for social security, relative to those in rural areas); crime and violence; traffic accidents; and natural disasters (Rakodi, 2002; Wratten, 1995).Now more than half of the world’s population lives in urban centers. Besides this, urban areas estimated to absorb the entire world’s population growth by the year between 2009 and 2050, and population growth, and urbanization expected to concentrate in Asia, Latin America and Africa (UN habitat, 2007).
Thus, urban population increases are taking place in regions that are still poor, raising concerns about growing urban poverty and the inability of national and city governments to give services to the residents of their burgeoning cities. National studies in many of these poorest countries suggest that more than half of the urban population is below the poverty line. And it is estimated that 900 million urban residents of this area live in settlements referred to as ‘slums’ (UN Habitat, 2008).
Ethiopia as one of the developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa gets used to the aforementioned features of urban poverty. It is estimated that in 1994, out of a total of 8.1 million urban population in the country, about 4.9 million (60.5%) were below the poverty line (Million, 1996, cited in UNCHS 2000). The 2004/05 Household Income Expenditure survey (HICES) the result, however, indicated the proportion of the nation’s urban population living below the poverty line as about 35%. Though recently it is reported that urban poverty declined substantially between 2004/05 and 2010/11, but it is limited to the incidence and depth of poverty. The 2010/11 urban poverty headcount and poverty gap are lower than that of 2004/05 by 27% and 10%, respectively. However, the poverty severity of 2010/11 is higher than that of 2004/05 by 5% (MoFED, 2012). The impact of this is felt mainly through higher food prices and a high level of unemployment and underemployment in urban areas (Beall and Kanji, 1999). Bahir Dar is the city with about more than 221 thousand people who share the above trait of urban poverty (CSA, 2007).
Urban poverty did not affect all people equally. Economic and social risks in urban areas have different impacts on men and women. This is because, women typically have lower levels of education; less access, ownership, and control of productive assets; less access to credit; and different social networks than men, leading to lower economic productivity and income generation and weaker bargaining positions in the household. Women in Ethiopia go through countless gender bias and discrimination. Some of these are: - Firstly, according to Debele (2006), a strong gender disparity in education. Girls are discriminated against within the household hence fewer resources may be spent on them for education, or are forced to spend more time in household chores which ultimately results in them in limited participation in formal education. For this reason, women make up more than 50% of the Ethiopian population but only 23% of the student population (CRR, 2003). However, though there is some improvement with a gender disparity ratio of girls to boys’ primary and secondary education, data on literacy show that only 18% of Ethiopian women are literate, compared to 42% of men (OXFAM, 2012).