There were a wide range of means at our fingertips to narrate the unsustainable conditions and rights violations in deep poverty: research, monitoring, photography, interviews, exhibitions, videos, and stories…

We chose stories as our tool for the Absent Stories project. Believing that the stories we encountered during our work in this field would be best told by their owners, we aimed to offer this book as a space for individuals directly exposed to poverty to have their voices heard. In the first part of the book, you will find the stories of fourteen individuals who had been involved in Deep Poverty Network. These stories were all narrated by their owners. They were then storified by the Deep Poverty Network team. The owner of each story was either kept anonymous or openly identified in the story depending as per their preference. The owner of each story read and finalised the respective text before publication. We found it interesting to end each story with information from relevant
legislation, research, and the media, etc.

The second part starts with a story penned by Hacer Foggo, who has been active in the field of poverty as a journalist and activist for 20 years. In this part, we compiled a quintessential diary of daily human rights stories told to us during the neighbourhood visits, telephone interviews, and support processes we conducted as Deep
Poverty Network. We hope to see the day that all conceptions and discussions of poverty be grounded in the recognition that poverty is a human rights violation and its elimination is possible only through seeing it, acknowledging it, and addressing it with a rights-based approach.

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