Institutional Change; Does it help alleviate Poverty?

Abstract: The problem of poverty is present all over the world. Poverty consists of many different factors and appears in different dimensions in all environments. Institutions are the rules and games of a society and are important to people experiencing poverty as they provide safety nets such as social security or strong social relations in the form of kinship ties. I will describe the role of institutions in indigenous societies experiencing poverty and discuss the affects of institutional change. As an example of my argument I will illustrate what effects formal institutional change such as applied government policies have had on the Maasai, an indigenous pastoral group living in northern Tanzania.