• A new global strategy against poverty needs to be mounted - with more resources, a sharper focus and a stronger commitment - based on the commitments made at the 1995 Social Summit.
  • Donor countries are cutting back on aid and failing to focus what remains on poverty.
    
  • UNDP needs to provide better assistance, more focused on helping to improve national policy-making and institutions.
    
  • For many countries it is in improving governance that external assistance is needed - but not as a new form of conditionality.
    
  • A major shortcoming of current anti-poverty planning is the lack of achievable time-bound goals and targets.
    
    • Fewer than a third of countries have set targets for eradicating extreme poverty or substantially reducing overall poverty.
      
    • Countries should also now explicitly incorporate human poverty targets into their planning.

Developing National Anti-poverty Plans

• Anti-poverty plans need to be comprehensive - much more than a few projects "targeted" at the poor.
  
  • They need adequate funding and effective coordination by a government department or committee with wide-ranging influence.
    
    • A special poverty reduction fund can help provide better financial accounting, coordination and resource mobilization.
      
    • A multidimensional problem, poverty should be addressed by a multisectoral approach, cutting across government ministries and departments.
      
• Anti-poverty plans should be nationally owned and determined - not donor driven.
  
  • Poverty programmes are often disjointed because external donors provide much of the funding - outside regular government channels - for individual projects.

Linking Poverty to National Policies

• A new generation of poverty programmes is needed that focus on making growth more pro-poor, target inequality and emphasize empowering the poor.
  • The old-school prescriptions of supplementing rapid growth with social spending and safety nets have proved inadequate.
  • Reforms are needed in old-style structural adjustment programmes, which took up poverty after the fact or as a residual social issue.
    
  • Policies for pro-poor growth should be an integral part of any national anti-poverty plan.
    
  • The sources of inequality, such as unequal distribution of land, need to be squarely addressed.

Linking Countries' International Policies to Poverty

• Countries should link their poverty programmes not only to their national policies but also to their international economic and financial policies - a connection rarely made.
  
  • External debt is now clearly linked to poverty - through the Enhanced HIPC - but indebted countries still doubt that relief will go far enough and are wary of new conditionalities.
    
  • Unlike debt, trade policies are not linked to poverty - as shown at the WTO meeting in Seattle.
    
    • If trade expansion is to benefit the poor, the international rules of the game must be made fairer - starting with eliminating the rich-country protectionism that is biased against developing countries.
      
  • Official development assistance - supposed to strengthen the hand of developing countries - has markedly declined and remains ill focused.
    
    • Many donors still rely on a hit-and-miss project approach, bypassing the government, dispersing efforts and eroding sustainability.

Governance: The Missing Link

• Responsive and accountable institutions of governance are often the missing link between anti-poverty efforts and poverty reduction.
  
  • Holding governments accountable to people is a bottom-line requirement for effective governance
    
    • Having regular elections - free and fair - can help, especially at the local level, but such democratic forms are no vaccination against poverty.
      
    • Accountability in the use of public funds is crucial to poverty reduction efforts.
      
    • Shifting decision-making power closer to poor communities by devolving authority and resources to local government can also help.
      
  • To ensure accountability and democracy, poor communities must organize themselves to advance their interests.
    
    • If corruption were cleaned up at the same time that the poor organized themselves, many national poverty programmes would undoubtedly ratchet up their performances in directing resources to the people who need them.

Pro-Poor Local Governance: The Neglected Reforms

• Campaigns against poverty have often bypassed and ignored local government, and have thus hampered their effectiveness in benefiting the poor.
  
  • Local government must be strengthened - and held accountable both to the central government for the funds allocated to it and to its constituents for how it uses them.
    
    • Although requiring time, resources and capacity building, the lasting benefits to the poor of such an approach will outweigh the immediate costs.

The Poor Organize: The Foundation for Success

• The foundation of poverty reduction is self-organization of the poor at the community level
  
  • This is the best antidote to powerlessness, a central source of poverty.
    
  • What the poor most need is not resources for safety nets but resources to build their own organizational capacity.
    
  • Once afforded the opportunity, communities can quickly build their own organizations and develop their own leaders.
    
    • Poor people can then combine their community groups into larger area-based institutions to exert influence with local government or the private sector.
      
• Civil society organizations arising outside poor communities can play a valuable role by engaging in policy advocacy on behalf of the poor and influencing national policy-making.
  
  • Relying on such civil society organizations to deliver goods and services to poor communities - more the responsibility of government - is inadvisable over the long term.
    
  • The goal is not for civil society organizations to take over the legitimate functions of the state, but to forge a strategic alliance between the state and civil society for poverty reduction.

Focusing Resources on the Poor

• Effective targeting follows from empowerment, not the other way around.
  
  • If the poor lack organization and power, the benefits of poverty programmes are unlikely to reach them - or, if they do, to make a lasting difference.
    
  • Most national poverty programmes rely on targeting benefits to the poor, but still assume that external agents deliver the benefits and that the poor are passive beneficiaries.
    
  • The very term targeting probably clouds the issue: better to talk more generally about focusing poverty reduction resources.
    
  • While targeted interventions can often be effective in reaching the poor, they are too often regarded as the core of national poverty programmes - and as a substitute for reform of national economic policies or governance institutions.

Integrating Poverty Programmes

• A general weakness of poverty programmes is their lack of integration, due in large part to organizing them as a set of targeted interventions unconnected to national policies.
  
  • Lack of integration is also due to the habit of thinking sectorally and organizing governments accordingly.
    
    • Poverty, a multisectoral problem, does not fit neatly into any one department or ministry.
      
  • The problem of lack of integration is especially acute with respect to such issues as gender and the environment.
    
  • Initiatives to promote basic education and health care - especially in combating major health epidemics - also need greater integration with national poverty programmes.

Monitoring Progress against Poverty

• Countries need a comprehensive but workable monitoring system to gauge their progress against poverty.
  • Targets for both income and human poverty should guide this system.
    
  • To illuminate the causes of poverty or generate enough policy-relevant information, large income and expenditure surveys will have to be supplemented with rapid monitoring surveys focused on human poverty and with participatory assessments.
    
  • A general weakness of poverty monitoring systems is that they are not designed to also provide evaluations of anti-poverty policies and programmes - so there is little systematic verification of what approaches work and what do not.

This site is maintained by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
Last updated April 3, 2000