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One out of every five Latin Americans—about 130 million people—have never known anything but poverty, subsisting on less than US$4 a day throughout their lives. These are the region's chronically poor, who have remained so despite unprecedented inroads against poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean since the turn of the century. This book takes a closer look at the region's entrenched poor, who and where they are, and how existing policies need to change to effectively assist the poor. The book shows significant variations of rates of chronic poverty across and within countries. The book posits that refinements to the existing policy toolkit —as opposed to more programs—may come a long way in helping the remaining poor. These refinements include intensifying efforts to improve coordination between different social and economic programs, which can boost the income-generation process and deal with the intergenerational transmission of chronic poverty by investing in early childhood development. In addition, there is an urgent need to adapt programs to directly address the psychological toll of chronic poverty on people's mindsets and aspirations, which currently undermines the effectiveness of existing policy efforts.

Relying on contributions from the International Movement ATD Fourth World, this book deals with questions such as:What does it mean to live in poverty, and especially in extreme poverty? How can very poor people be reached through development projects? How can we assess whether projects succeed in changing the lives of the poorest individuals? In answering these questions, the emphasis is on exploring what type of knowledge is needed to fight extreme poverty. A key argument is that apart from academic knowledge, a concerted effort is needed to listen to the knowledge of poor people themselves, as well as to the knowledge of practitioners who are engaged with them on a daily basis to fight poverty. After the introductory chapter, the text of a speech by Joseph Wresinski (founder of the International Movement ATD Fourth World) at a congress of social scientists held at UNESCO, is reproduced. The next contribution is based on comments by the International Movement ATD Fourth World on the World Bank’s World Development Report 2004 Making Services Work for Poor People. Thereafter, case studies are provided on participatory approaches to attacking extreme poverty in both developing countries (Madagascar and Tanzania, as well as Bolivia, Guatemala, and Peru) and developed countries (the United States and Belgium).

This book reviews quantitative methods and models of impact evaluation. The formal literature on impact evaluation methods and practices is large, with a few useful overviews. Yet there is a need to put the theory into practice in a hands-on fashion for practitioners. This book also details challenges and goals in other realms of evaluation, including monitoring and evaluation (M&E), operational evaluation, and mixed-methods approaches combining quantitative and qualitative analyses. This book is organized as follows. Chapter two reviews the basic issues pertaining to an evaluation of an intervention to reach certain targets and goals. It distinguishes impact evaluation from related concepts such as M&E, operational evaluation, qualitative versus quantitative evaluation, and ex-ante versus ex post impact evaluation. Chapter three focuses on the experimental design of an impact evaluation, discussing its strengths and shortcomings. Various non-experimental methods exist as well, each of which are discussed in turn through chapters four to seven. Chapter four examines matching methods, including the propensity score matching technique. Chapter five deal with double-difference methods in the context of panel data, which relax some of the assumptions on the potential sources of selection bias. Chapter six reviews the instrumental variable method, which further relaxes assumptions on self-selection. Chapter seven examines regression discontinuity and pipeline methods, which exploit the design of the program itself as potential sources of identification of program impacts. Specifically, chapter eight presents a discussion of how distributional impacts of programs can be measured, including new techniques related to quantile regression. Chapter nine discusses structural approaches to program evaluation, including economic models that can lay the groundwork for estimating direct and indirect effects of a program. Finally, chapter ten discusses the strengths and weaknesses of experimental and non-experimental methods and also highlights the usefulness of impact evaluation tools in policy making.

This thesis focuses upon poverty and poverty reduction programmes within Son La province, North-West Vietnam. Ethnic minority groups constitute 86 per cent of the total population of this province and are disproportionately subjected to poverty, both within the province and the nation. A critical analysis of current poverty reduction programmes and their sustainability, with particular reference to ethnic minority groups in Son La province, is undertaken. The thesis then proposes a new, sustainable approach to poverty alleviation for ethnic minority groups in Son La province. Drawing upon original, primary, qualitative research conducted by the author, it is argued that the current poverty reduction policies in Son La province specifically, and Vietnam more widely, with particular reference to ethnic minority groups, have many limitations. It is contended here that asset based approaches are most suitable for the sustainable activation of growth and the reduction of poverty within Son La province, and the reduction of poverty amongst ethnic minority groups within Vietnam generally. The nation should formulate a holistic programme for improving grassroots governance in ethnic minority communities in order to improve the accountability of local authorities, based on voice enhancement for, and the empowerment of, local people and village institutions.

By all measures, poverty in Africa as a whole has increased and deepened. But in fact, Africa contains a number of undocumented success stories of poverty reduction. This book presents case studies of thirteen of these success stories, giving grounds for some real hope, and providing useful learning for all ? policymakers, governments, businesses, service providers, NGOs, and donors.

Poverty persists at an alarming level in Bangladesh. To reduce extreme poverty and create the foundation for a sustainable livelihood change, BRAC undertook a targeted programme since 2002 named, Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction/Targeting the Ultra Poor (CFPR/TUP). To investigate the impact of the CFPR/TUP programme on food and energy consumption. Two cross sectional surveys on food consumption were conducted, a pre-intervention survey in 2002 and a post-intervention survey in 2004 covering 180 intervention and 193 non-intervention households. Three days' recall method was administrated in both the survey rounds. The baseline food consumption survey showed an inadequate food intake in all households, which did not differ between the two groups. At post-intervention, the quality and quantity of food intake improved significantly in the intervention households as compared to baseline. In this group, the consumption of various food items such as rice, pulse, vegetables, fish, fruit, milk and egg showed significant improvement (p<0.001), particularly, the level of fish consumption doubled in intervention households while in control households it remained almost unchanged (14 g/day to 27 g/day for intervention vs. 11 g/day to 13 g/day for control). Energy intake increased from 1750+/-650 Kcal/day to 2138+/-704 Kcal/day in intervention households (p<0.001), whereas no significant change was observed in control households. Percentages of energy from cereals decreased from 85% to 78% in intervention households (p<0.001) while it remained unchanged in control households. CFPR/TUP programme seems to have direct impact on ultra poor family's ability to significantly increase consumption of food and energy.

Seasonal hunger induced by agricultural seasonality is often a characteristic feature of rural poverty. The evidence of seasonal distress in many agrarian societies can be found in the narratives of economic historians. With agricultural diversification made possible through technological breakthroughs in many parts of the developing world, the severity of seasonal stress and adversities has been reduced considerably, if not altogether eliminated. In certain agricultural settings, however, the seasonality of poverty and hunger, along with the associated seasonal shortfalls in income and consumption, is still a policy quagmire. The problem gets more complicated when agricultural seasonality is locked into a cycle of endemic poverty, seasonal hunger, and risk of further impoverishment. Poverty and seasonality may also reinforce each other through various other forces that create and sustain both. The thrust of policy needs to be to break this interlocking cycle of poverty and seasonality. The book has nine chapters. Chapter two looks at the key conceptual issues and presents a global perspective on the challenge of addressing seasonal hunger. Chapter three brings Bangladesh's reality to the fore regarding seasonal poverty and food insecurity and the vulnerability of the northwest region. Chapter four analyzes the vulnerability of households to seasonal hunger, their coping strategies, and the extent to which income seasonality affects seasonal poverty and food deprivation. Chapter five reports some findings for both the Rangpur region and the country as a whole regarding the effects of policies and programs on poverty and food deprivation. The findings reported in the next three chapters are mainly related to the Rangpur region only. Chapter six examines the issue of seasonal migration in the context of mitigating seasonal deprivation. In chapter seven, the impact of the social safety-net programs is tested, whereas the effectiveness of microfinance is assessed in chapter eight. The concluding chapter, chapter nine, looks at the policy implications while also pointing to some emerging challenges.

The analytical, conceptual, and political framework of development is changing dramatically. The new development agenda calls for broader understandings of sectors, countries, development strategies, and policies. It emphasizes learning and continuous feedback at all phases of the development cycle. As the development agenda grows in scope and complexity, development evaluation follows suit. Development evaluator are moving away from traditional implementation and output-focused evaluation models toward results-based evaluation models, as the development community calls for results and embraces the millennium development goals. As the development community shifts its focus away from projects in order to comprehensively address country challenges, development evaluators are seeking methods with which to assess results at the country, sector, theme, policy, and even global levels. As the development community recognizes the importance of not only a comprehensive but also a coordinated approach to developing country challenges and emphasizes partnerships, development evaluators are increasingly engaged in joint evaluations. These joint evaluations, while advantageous in many respects, add to the complexity of development evaluation (OECD 2006). Additionally, development evaluators increasingly face the measurement challenge of determining the performance of an individual development organization in this broader context and of identifying its contribution. This text is intended as a tool for use in building development evaluation capacity. It aims to help development evaluators think about and explore the new evaluation architecture and especially to design and conduct evaluations that focus on results in meeting the challenges of development.

Capturing the findings from the Shanghai Global Learning Initiative, Reducing Poverty on a Global Scale attempts to contribute to the broader existing knowledge on poverty reduction and the effectiveness of aid. The objective is to enlighten development practitioners about observed achievements towards reducing poverty and the factors behind them. Each of the chapters extracts implementation lessons learnt from a subset of case studies prepared along different poverty dimensions, focusing on such factors as the role of commitment and leadership, institutional innovation, learning and experimentation, and external catalysts. Instead of recommending particular solutions or best practices, the book distills key findings from the strategically selected examples and weaves them into a topical narrative.

The case studies in this book were developed as part of a year-long learning process initiated by the World Bank in 2003-4 to examine large scale poverty reduction programs in a wide range of developing countries around the world. This volume presents 12 of the case studies from South Asia. . The last two decades saw substantial change in the countries of South Asia. All countries of the subcontinent experienced more rapid growth than in the earlier decades and also saw a definite reduction in the incidence of poverty, resulting in the improvement of the lives of hundreds of millions of poor people. One common element was the adoption of broad based economic reforms involving rethinking of earlier approaches to development. The reforms in South Asia were notable in that they were homegrown, gradual, and accompanied by continual redesign and fine tuning. Individuals can make a difference in fighting poverty when ways are found to institutionalize creative ideas and apply them on a scale extending beyond pilot projects. This book recounts 12 such cases from a range of countries and sectors in the South Asia region, with a focus on how these programmes scaled up and on the potential for applying lessons in other settings. These case studies do not offer a blueprint or model for poverty reduction; there is no single model. Nor do they cover every issue that is important. But they suggest the range of ideas that can be successful and the underlying principles that cut across these diverse initiatives. All the programmes tap the imagination and ingenuity of the South Asian people- in government offices, in civil society organizations, in the private sector, and in the villages and urban neighborhoods. All seek to empower poor people to access the economic opportunities and basic services so necessary to human dignity. The lessons are complex, and applying them will undoubtedly require redesign and fine-tuning to fit the initiatives to the local context. What is important, however, is that the experience of the last two decades has shown that reforms and scaling-up innovations can work in South Asia-and if these examples can be strengthened and expanded in the coming decades, the dreams of a subcontinent free of poverty may be realized.