Where Poverty Breaks or Persists: From Housing to Sustainable Livelihood Outcomes

In many fast-growing cities, poverty is anything but a single condition. It is an interlocking web of housing precarity, unstable incomes, overstretched infrastructure, and limited access to opportunities. Many families navigate these pressures with ingenuity, but the pathways out of poverty remain narrow, fragile, and dependent on short-term relief.

This Impact Studio explores practical urban programmes that help families move towards lasting stability. It will focus on how the Urban Graduation Approach—featuring sequenced, time-bound, innovative, targeted support with capability building that helps households develop sustainable livelihoods and self-reliance—can be effectively scaled in dense city settings. Drawing on successful local applications through initiatives including JC PROJECT LIFT and the Jockey Club Community Kitchen series, which provides extended living space and helps build social capital for underprivileged families in inadequate housing, the discussion will examine what worked, why, and how these insights can inform future urban interventions.

At its heart, this Impact Studio is about possibility—how pathways can be found from precarity to dignity, from makeshift shelter to a place one can truly call home.