The Multiple Meanings of Prosperity and Poverty in Tanzania

Abstract

This book focuses heavily on changing patterns in ownership of assets. In other analyses where assets are used to investigate change then one of the standard means of investigating wealth and poverty is to construct asset indices to examine patterns across space and over time. Assets are important to local definitions of poverty and wealth in rural Africa. Yet their use in asset indices can miss locally valued change. The chapter presents data from seventeen villages across Tanzania to explore differences in the meaning of wealth and poverty across the country. Despite limitations in our site selection we found considerable diversity that makes a single asset index difficult to compile. Current abbreviated asset indices risk counting assets that do not matter locally.