Engendering poverty alleviation: Challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Poverty eradication has re-emerged as an important item on the agenda of global development. As the contributions to this volume show, in recent years understandings of poverty and what constitutes well-being have been significantly broadened. At the same time, what the volume also demonstrates is that the richness of concepts sits uncomfortably with the poverty of methods and data: the unresolved methodological problems that plague the measurement and analysis of poverty, especially from a gender perspective, and the lack of timely and reliable data. These are important considerations not only from an 'academic' point of view, but also as far as the arena of public action is concerned, an arena which is becoming increasingly 'knowledge-based'. In this short article, however, I want to move away from the methodological questions posed by the other contributors, and point to another irony that is evident in the area of poverty research and action: namely, the diversity of concepts versus the uniformity of strategies for poverty eradication. Changes in the political and ideological climate during the last two decades pose major challenges to how anti-poverty strategies are conceptualized and implemented. This note does not attempt to address these issues in a comprehensive manner, but only highlights certain aspects of the context and the challenges, as well as pointing to the potential for new directions.