ABSTRACT
A budget survey of twenty-four people living in eighteen households gives an overview of poverty and livelihoods. Jonyalo, ‘people who are managing’, were a minority. They were women whose husbands had a steady job and old men living on their pensions. Differentiation in Koguta was not about accumulation, but only about differing degrees of impoverishment. The important difference was between people who could maintain an adequate standard of living and the majority who were falling more and more deeply into poverty. Most households who received remittances depended on just one source — the state, husbands, children and other close relatives, mainly siblings. Some of the people who depended heavily on remittances were elderly widows who were getting support from their children. A woman who traded was making a public demonstration of the household’s failure to conform to the ideal.
