An Innovation in Poverty Measurement Based on Community Capital: A Case Study of Young Fishermen in Malaysia

Abstract

Poverty measurement has been seen by many scholars as too often focusing on the economic element. The implication of this is that it does not completely benefit policymakers to design a meticulous policy to support poor people, especially the young, to escape poverty traps. This article brings an innovative poverty measurement based on community capital that adopts Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) theory in the community development discipline. The research was conducted based on a quantitative approach and involved 83 young fishermen who were heads of households (HoH) in a fishing village in Kelantan, Malaysia. No sampling was applied in this research because a census was used. The findings show that the majority of respondents are categorized as poor, but have various forms of community capital that can be leveraged to deal with poverty. However, they are not proficient in human capital, particularly in contemporary human capital, though they have good relationships with all kinds of social capital. They also have various values overall, but there is no dominant value to influence their life. This study also successfully categorized respondents into specific degrees of poverty based on their community capital using a kind of spiderweb of young HoH. This study recommends that poverty should be measured based on this innovative measurement of poverty that considers community capital elements.