Assessing and Addressing Urban Poverty in Malaysia: Social Mobility through Entrepreneurship

This book proposes to assess and address urban poverty in Malaysia. As Malaysia emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, decades of progress in successful poverty reduction have been reversed, especially in urban areas nationwide. Lockdown measures resulted in rising unemployment and underemployment, decreased salaries, and reduced household incomes, all of which contributed to elevated levels of poverty. In comparison with the rural poor, the urban poor bore the brunt of the reversal due to widespread business closures that impacted informal business activity in cities, the inability to transition to remote working arrangements, a substantial reduction in salaries and wages, increased urban food insecurity, and tight quarters in low-cost housing projects.

The approach the authors embrace is to move away from the idea of providing the urban poor with the resources they do not have, but rather to promote reforms that can place them in the conditions to earn the resources they believe they need. The book’s motto is: social mobility through entrepreneurship.

This research project was initiated by the Embassy of the Kingdom of Belgium to Malaysia and Brunei, in the person of H.E. Mr Pascal Gregoire, and jointly conducted by the Center for Market Education and Bait Al-Amanah.

The authors:
Benedict Weerasena is the Research Director of Bait Al Amanah (House of Trust). Carmelo Ferlito is the CEO of the Center for Market Education (CME).

H.E. Pascal Gregoire, Ambassador of the Kingdom of Belgium to Malaysia and Brunei, provided a foreword to the book.