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Empowerment and Poverty Reduction : A Sourcebook
No full textPoverty will not be reduced on a large
scale, without tapping into the energy, skills, and
motivation of the millions of poor people around the world.
This book offers a framework for empowerment, that focuses
on increasing poor people's freedom of choice, and
action to shape their own lives. This approach requires
three societal changes: a change in the mindset, from
viewing poor people as the problem to viewing them as
essential partners in reducing poverty; a change in the
relationship between poor people, and formal systems,
enabling them to participate in decisions that affect their
lives; and, a change in formal, and informal institutions to
make them more responsive to the needs, and realities of
poor people. Based on analysis of experiences from around
the world, the book identifies four key elements to support
empowerment of poor people: information,
inclusions/participation, accountability, and local
organizational capacity. This framework is applied to five
areas of action to improve development effectiveness. These
are: provision of basic services, improved local governance,
improved national governance, pro-poor market development,
and access to justice, and legal aid. The book also offers
tools and practices, focusing on a wide range of topics, to
support poor people's empowerment. These range from
poor people's enterprises, information and
communications technology, and, community driven
development, to diagnostic tools such as corruption surveys,
and citizen report cards
Measuring Empowerment : Cross Disciplinary Perspectives
No full textPoverty reduction on a large scale
depends on empowering those who are most motivated to move
out of poverty-poor people themselves. But if empowerment
cannot be measured, it will not be taken seriously in
development policy making and programming. Building on the
"Empowerment and Poverty Reduction Sourcebook,"
this volume outlines a conceptual framework that can be used
to monitor and evaluate programs centered on empowerment
approaches. It presents the perspectives of 27 distinguished
researchers and practitioners in economics, political
science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and
demography, all of whom are grappling in different ways with
the challenge of measuring empowerment. The authors draw
from their research and experiences at different levels,
from households to communities to nations, in various
regions of the world. Measuring Empowerment is a resource
for all who are interested in approaches to poverty
reduction that address issues of inequitable power relations
La voz de los pobres desde muchas tierras
No full textThis is the final book in a three-part
series entitled, "Voices of the Poor." The series
is based on an unprecedented effort to gather the views,
experiences, and aspirations of more than 60,000 poor men
and women from sixty countries. The work was undertaken for
the "World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking
Poverty." This publication is organized as follows:
Each country chapter opens up with a brief life story. These
life stories were chosen because they highlight concerns
raised not only by poor women and men living in that
particular community, but because the same concerns were
echoed in other parts of the country. The chapters then
unfold around particular sets of issues that emerged
repeatedly in group discussions and individual interviews.
While the findings reported in the chapters cannot be
generalized to represent poverty conditions for an entire
nation, the chapters bring to life what it means to be poor
in various communities, in fourteen countries, from the
perspective of poor people. In the final chapter, four major
patterns emerge: Poor people need a diverse set of assets
and capabilities if they are to survive and overcome
poverty. Economy-wide policies and shocks deplete poor
people's assets and increase their insecurity. The
culture of mediating institutions often negatively distorts
the impact of well-intended policies and excludes the poor
from gains. Gender inequity within households is persistent
and children are acutely vulnerable
Participatory Methods in the Analysis of Poverty: A Critical Review
Full text linkThis paper reviews and analyses the literature on participatory methods in poverty analysis. The popularity of participatory poverty assessments has greatly increased in the last decade, and a growing number of development agents is adopting some form of participatory methodology. This spread however seems to be possible even without a shared understanding of what participation stands for. This paper starts by introducing the broad lines of the debate on participation, before focusing more specifically on participatory methods in poverty analysis. After having discussed the tools as well as the insights they provide, some recent evidence comparing participatory and non-participatory methods is presented. Such literature allow to highlight both the strengths and the weaknesses of participatory assessments, as well as opening the way for new approaches integrating elements of both. In the last analysis, however, the challenge to the non-extractive nature of the methodology, posed by the transposition of participatory techniques from the project context in which they were developed to the policy one, remains serious and poses questions on what 'listening to the voices of the poor' means.
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