Assets for well-being for women living in deep poverty: through a salutogenic looking-glass

Abstract

This paper explores assets for health and well-being for women in extremely poor rural areas in Ghana, Haiti, India, the Philippines, and Tanzania. Data were collected through individual interviews and focus group interviews with local women. The paper asks (i) which assets women draw on for well-being in resource-poor settings, and (ii) whether an assets approach, as understood in the Salutogenic Model, is appropriate and meaningful in the most deprived areas. Low levels of natural, material and infrastructural resources were reported by the respondents to cause stress, and assets of a human, social and cultural character were identified as being important in coping with this stress. By mobilizing the capacity and assets of people and places, local development initiatives will make sense logically (comprehensibility), they will be perceived to be practically realistic (manageability), and they will be motivating because they are meaningful, based on involvement in decision-making (meaningfulness). The assets focus must co-exist with initiatives to improve distributional justice. We conclude that an asset approach to well-being is not only appropriate, but also necessary, in even the poorest contexts.

Keywords:

• assets
• salutogenesis
• women
• well-being
• poverty

Acknowledgements

Without the generosity of our respondents in sharing their valuable time with us, this project would not have been possible. We are also thankful for the goodwill and cooperation of the NGOs who opened the local doors for us (see specifications in Table 1). We thank all our team members for data collection and analyses in the various study sites. Finally, this project could not have been undertaken without funding from the Department of Health, UK.