Determinants of regional poverty in Uganda

The study sought in-depth knowledge of the key factors that account for regional povertydifferentials in Uganda so as to contribute to more focused targeting of programmes forthe poor. The research objectives were: to estimate the national and regional food povertylines to identify poor households, to compare the socioeconomic and demographiccharacteristics of the poor households between and within the regions, to compute povertyindexes for Uganda based on national and regional food poverty lines, to identify the keydeterminants of regional poverty, and to derive policy implications for poverty alleviationin Uganda.With primary data from the Integrated Household Survey, 1992, the studyused the Greer–Thorbecke methodology to compute poverty lines and poverty indexes.The logistic regression was used to analyse the key determinants of poverty and fivemodels were fitted (one national and four regional).Northern Uganda was found to be the poorest region; it has the largest depth of povertyand worst inequality. It is characterized by the poor having large mean household sizes,least education, least mean household income, least expenditure on health, lowest chanceof child survival and highest concentration in the rural areas. Educational level ofhousehold head, household size and migration status were found to be significantdeterminants of poverty at multivariate levels.The broad policy recommendation is that government should use regional povertylines for the planning and budgetary allocation process for effective poverty alleviation.