Measuring Poverty As If Gender Matters: Perspectives from Fieldwork in Fiji

This research project was aimed at synthesising and integrating various experiences and perspectives on poverty held both by poor women and men and by professional poverty experts. The project team began with a review of the professional knowledge contained in the vast multidisciplinary literature on gender and poverty, gender and development, and gender-sensitive measures of poverty. Fieldwork was carried out in six countries — Angola, Fiji, Indonesia, Malawi, Mozambique and the Philippines — in order to understand how the poorest people in some very poor countries viewed poverty and related hardships, and to what extent they saw these as gendered. This paper focuses only on fieldwork conducted in Fiji.