Search Results

This chapter examines how anti-poverty transfer programmes can drive global extreme poverty to zero. Current trends indicate that global poverty is a crucial issue not only in poor countries but also in low- and middle-income countries. Indeed, the majority of people in extreme poverty today live in middle-income countries and are likely to concentrate in sub-Saharan Africa. In order to reduce extreme poverty worldwide to zero, there is a need to pay special attention to policies facilitating the social and economic inclusion of groups in extreme poverty. The chapter first considers the interrelationships between antipoverty transfers, inclusion of disadvantaged groups, and human development before discussing the outcomes of existing antipoverty transfer programmes. It also highlights the main policy lessons and concludes with an analysis of the role of international aid in anti-poverty transfer programmes.

This chapter discusses poverty alleviation efforts in India. Eradication of poverty has long been the overarching objective of Indian economic development. All the pre-independence plans for Indian development, including those of the National Planning Committee, M. Visveswaraya, and the Indian Federation of Labour, identified poverty as the central problem of the Indian economy. However, even after nearly fifty years of planning, more than a third of India's population still has a monthly consumption below the extremely modest poverty line. This chapter suggests that anti-poverty programmes that either do not reach the poor or bestow disproportionate benefits to the non-poor should be reformed. It explains that a majority of India's safety-net initiatives are misusing scarce financial resources that could be best invested to increase the poor's access to health and education services that have been shown to equip the poor to help themselves.

This chapter discusses the process of evaluating — with the role of social science in the establishment of outcomes and effectiveness in the achievement of those outcomes. It reviews the role of evaluation in relation to policies in all areas. It deals with the actual politics of evaluation, that is to say the way in which political pressures intrude into the evaluation process with examples. It develops a realist/complexity-founded approach to evaluation — drawing here on a synthesis of the arguments of Pawson and Tilley (1997) with the complexity frame of reference. It develops the argument that evaluation is a process in which multiple voices must be heard — by drawing examples of evaluation in practice looking at education, health and anti-poverty programmes.