Households headed by women, more common in cities, are particularly vulnerable to poverty. Women generally have more limited access to education, and suffer disparities in employment opportunities and wage levels compared to their male counterparts. Women have the additional burdens of culture and tradition that can manifest in legal and social obstacles to access to land. Faced with limited opportunities and the necessity to meet basic needs, many poor women are forced into highly vulnerable and dangerous jobs in the commercial sex industry and other degrading means of employment. Additionally, domestic violence poses a serious, and largely unacknowledged, threat to women.
Urban poverty has many causes.
Some of these are the willingness of new migrants to take low paid jobs in the city, increases in the cost of land, long journeys to work, less support from an extended family network, exposure to greater environmental risk, and greater vulnerability to changes in market conditions in urban areas. Conditions of urban poverty are worsened by the scale and speed of urbanization in many DMCs, forces with which municipal governments cannot keep pace. In a situation of scarce resource allocation, the urban poor are badly placed to compete for essential services and shelter. Biases in investments, standards, pricing policies, and institutional structures often skew services in favor of the better-off in cities. For example, access to water is generally provided unevenly among income groups, with formal supply systems being denied to poor communities who are forced to turn to water vendors and often pay much more per liter than higher income households.