Customer satisfaction towards the financing scheme of Amanah Ikhtiar Malaysia

Poverty is always one of the major problems faced by most governments of the developing countries. In Malaysia, poverty is conceptualized and defined as the lack of income to acquire minimum necessities of life as measured by the poverty line income (PLI), an income which less than sufficient to purchase a minimum food basket to maintain households in good nutritional health and other basic necessities. In Malaysia, poverty is categorized into two categories poor and hardcore poor. The concept of hardcore poor was introduced in 1989. The distinction between both categories is the poor is defined as household earnings less than the national poverty line income (RM800), while hardcore poor as that household earnings half of the poverty line income, approximately RM488. Poverty is not only related to specific income variables, but accounts for other factors such as accessibility of education, health, shelter, non-food components like clothing and footwear, rent, fuel and transport, communication, recreation, and physical facilities. Thus, based on such view which is multi-facets, the approach to tackling the problems of poverty is supposedly based on the characteristics of poverty-related phenomena. Generally, these poverty-related phenomena may be divided into three categories: (1) low income; (2) non-income factors such as poor health and low literacy rate; and (3) lack of access to opportunities such as physical facilities, resources and employment.