Report

Crossing the Poverty Line: The Density of Sudanese Middle Class Public Sector Employees

“This study is an attempt to highlight the living conditions of the Sudanese middle-class. The middle-class is defined by characteristics other than income. Our definition of the word class is synonymous with what is known as stratum. According to Abdel Ghaffar (1984), the uneven and unequal development between regions and ethnic groups has brought about a striking emergence
of a variety of new socio-economic strata in the Sudanese society. These strata, in turn, can be “referred to as more or less, as classes in the very general sense of the term”. By this it is meant that the term class is not to be politically and socially loaded. This is simply because our purpose is to specifically determine the poor middle-class and, then, to investigate the poverty situation within this class. The target groups of this study are the fixed income groups (the salaried) of the urban public sector in Greater Khartoum. These groups were
taken as representatives of the middle-class.”