The aim of this study is to investigate enabling strategies toward poverty reduction under the broader concept of empowerment through participation. It is believed that such a strategy would decrease the cost of social policies by redefining the problem of poverty as an individual problem rather than a structural one rooted in social and economic policies. By following this reasoning, the main aim is defined as reducing the number of poor instead of poverty itself as a part of wider policies. Within this framework, the central government of Turkey has prepared a project to the World Bank called Social Risk Mitigation Project. Vast number of people has applied to Social Solidarity Fund to benefit form this scheme. In the thesis, the information given by the applicants is evaluated to assess various dimensions of poverty experienced by the applicants, including education, employment, income, and household structure. It is found out that despite the heterogeneity of the poverty experiences across different social groups and geographical regions, there are also common experiences such as wide spread lack of social security among all groups. It is also striking that there are relatively well-educated household head that applied to the scheme. This is the worrying given the fact that one of the main objectives of the scheme is to solve poverty problem by increasing the education level of the targeted poor population.

The world has witnessed a transformation process associated with the drastic changes in social, political and economic spheres under the constraints of neo-liberalism with opening up new challenges for humanity. At that context, as a global problem, poverty has been aggravating at the world-wide and now urban areas are more exposed to risks of poverty. In this regard, reforms of that restructuring process have centered on the requirement of local administrations at poverty struggle. The purpose of this study is to explore local policy initiatives of local administrations at combating urban poverty with also taking into consideration the central government practices. By the help of the GEKA provinces of Denizli, Aydin, and Mugla cases, urban poverty struggle has been examined in detail by a method covering survey application to the impoverished and the in-depth interview method with local and central government officials. At the study, it is seen that in each case study, local administrations have different institutional, political and social service based contingency variables. Local authorities of case provinces cannot produce systematic, standardized, equal and general poverty alleviation policies and services because of the inherent nature of local government tied to uneven development and contingent local variation. Thus, within the limitation of the study, urban poverty struggle have been searched in specific cases, but it is not possible to determine the results of the research to other cases in Turkey. Even though the research covers up few cases at the urban level, the results will be worthwhile and shed light on other future studies.

This study attempts to focus on a narrower scope specifically is aimed to search for the possible explanations for women&rsquo / s and their daughters&rsquo / poverty experiences by arguing that within the household, women and their daughters are more vulnerable to poverty than men because of the dominant ideologies. I have already implemented a field study in one of Ankara&rsquo / s squatter area which is called Hidirliktepe located in district of Altindag with 30 women and their eldest daughters living in the same household. One of the qualitative interviewing techniques, in-depth interviewing, has been applied to the respondents and two different questionnaire frames used for mothers and the daughters. There are some important conclusions of the thesis. One of them is that poverty is experienced by women and their daughters different than the other members of the household. Another is that these experiences are also transferred to their daughters within the household. However, daughters are in a better condition than their mothers which might constitute a hope for their salvation from poverty because due to the changes in their social environments, their expectations also change. Moreover, survival strategies developed by women against poverty designate the level of poverty which is being experienced by women in the long term.