Researching urban poverty in sub-Saharan Africa

Poverty and the way in which it is researched are major preoccupations for many social scientists. This article presents different ways of researching urban poverty in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), focusing on qualitative methods and the different ways in which these can be used to collect data. Examples are drawn from field research carried out in urban areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaïre) to illustrate the ways that different research methods and techniques are used in the field and how a researcher might organise data collection.