Those scraping a living as street vendors, subsistence farmers, day labourers and so on are unlikely to feature.So decisions about who should receive benefits often rely on observable proxies for poverty, such as whether someone is old or orphaned, lives in poor-quality housing or lacks consumer goods such as a fridge.
And most of the fugitive warriors are poor and uneducated, with few prospects, in a country where the only real economic activity is the informal entrepreneurship of the bazaars and streets or subsistence farming on drought-dried land.
Females who depend on the street for their subsistence, but usually return home at night.
This is not unconnected with the fact that subsistence on the street often times requires children to recourse to crime [ 11, 12] and in many jurisdictions in the region being a street-child itself is a status offence.
This population includes those who work in the informal sector (e.g. street vendors, minibus taxi drivers), subsistence farmers and those who are not involved in any productive economic activities.
Often perceived as petty street musicians, who perform to earn subsistence living, their talent remains hidden, without avenues to become fulltime professionals.
"Harnessing the potential and energy of the huge numbers of young people across Asia is key to the continent's growth but we need good data on vulnerable young people that captures the full picture – numbers of poor girls, unemployed boys, ethnic minorities, or youth living in rural areas on subsistence, or on city streets," said Daniel Toole, UNICEF's Regional Director for South Asia.
If some company down the street pays its security guards less than a subsistence wage, why is Harvard, the wealthiest university in the nation, obligated to follow suit?
People who are spending their days walking miles to get water, who are afflicted by diarrhea, or who are tending to family members who are sick, often are relegated to subsistence farming or informal sector jobs like street hawking.
Threats of tanks, a veto on entry to the EU, the economy coming apart and a return to subsistence farming and scavenging in rubbish-strewn streets.
