Despite the excellent progress made by Uganda in reducing poverty since 1992, there have
also been substantial movements both into and out of poverty, and a significant minority of
households have been persistently poor (Okidi and McKay, 2003). Two different panel data
sets over the 1990s establish the significant extent of persistent or chronic poverty, and show
that there is a strong associated between poverty persistence and the depth of poverty – in
other words many of the persistent poor are also among the poorest of the poor at any point in
time. Clearly these households have failed to benefit from Uganda’s impressive
macroeconomic development over this period. In addition, the most recent estimates for
poverty dynamics suggest that up to one third of households moved out of poverty, and a
tenth moved into poverty, over an eight year period to 1999.
Given this fact, as well as just focusing on the chronic poor, it is important also to consider
how and why some households have been able to escape from poverty, which may help in
understanding why the chronic poor have been unable to make this transition. At the same
time it is also important to see why some households have bucked the aggregate trend, and
fallen into poverty despite not being poor initially.
This paper builds strongly on Okidi’s work with different authors exploiting the available
panel data sets for Uganda (Deininger and Okidi, 2002; Okidi and McKay, 2003 among
others). It also uses primarily the same two nationally representative household panels (1992-
1995 and 1992-00), in combination with the results of the two rounds of the Uganda
Participatory Poverty Assessment Project (UPPAP), to gain insights on the factors associated
with poverty transitions and persistence. The paper is primarily based on both descriptive and
econometric analysis of the panel data set.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews approaches which have been
taken to modelling the factors associated with chronic and transient poverty, poverty
transitions and so on to date. Section 3 describes the information sources used, including
describing the survey data and the steps involved to establish as reliable a panel data set as
possible. This is followed in section 4 by a descriptive analysis of the patterns of poverty
discusses according to several different characteristics of the households concerned, and
forms the basis for the more detail multivariate econometric analysis in section 5. Section 6
concludes.