This report focuses on multidimensional poverty, as measured by household deprivations in health, education, and living standards. Multidimensional measures of poverty are meant to complement monetary measures, and so provide a more holistic understanding of what it means to live in poverty.
Read MoreHow can public policy enhance female employment and empower women economically as countries urbanize?
Urbanisation and labour force participation can be powerful drivers of women economic empowerment. This paper reviews the empowering and disempowering effects of urbanisation on the the main areas of work performed by women in cities and analyses the interventions which have been implemented to support the different types of female urban livelihoods
Read MoreGood governance, local government, accountability and service delivery in Tanzania
A performance index for local governance in Tanzania needs to provide a clear indication of how effectively local government and partners are delivering public services, supporting livelihoods and ensuring peace and security. This paper sets out the context of good governance, local governance, accountability and local service delivery in Tanzania.
Authors: Anna Mdee and Lisa Thorley
Read MoreImproving the delivery of public services What role could a local governance index play?
One of the most powerful ideas in development in recent years has been good governance. This review of available evidence considers how the performance of local governance can be improved in relation to the better delivery of services, through the use of a local governance performance index. It also considers how the public tracking of locally meaningful measures of governance can be used to improve the accountability of local government bureaucracies and politicians.
Authors: Anna Mdee and Lisa Thorley
Read MoreCompatible or contradictory? The challenge of inclusive structural economic and environmental transformation
Multiple transformations are being sought in our societies in the face of the accelerating risk of climate change and the need to eradicate poverty. This paper sets out to explore current evidence and debate on structural economic transformation and environmental (green) transformation in relation to the eradication of poverty.
Authors: Anna Mdee, Richard Emmott and Alberto Lemma
Read MoreSustainable escapes from poverty through productive inclusion
This policy guide looks at evidence from social protection programmes with innovative designs that combine different interventions, either following a graduation approach or by building integrated social protection systems.
Authors: Chiara Mariotti, Martina Ulrichs and Luke Harman
Read MoreEnsuring Escapes from Poverty are Sustained in Rural Ethiopia
This report examines why some households in Ethiopia are able to escape poverty and remain out of it—that is, they experience sustained escapes from poverty—while others escape poverty only to return to living in it again – that is, they experience transitory escapes. The report investigates the resources (land, livestock, and value of assets), attributes (household composition and education level), and activities (including jobs, engagement in non-farm activities and migration) of households that enable them to escape poverty sustainably and minimize the likelihood of returning to living in poverty again.
Authors: Chiara Mariotti and Vidya Diwakar
Conference Report - CPAN-ADB Conference on Pro-poorest Growth and the SDGs: emerging issues
The international community has committed to Leaving No One Behind. This means poverty eradication shouldn’t count as such if certain people are systematically excluded from it. Growth is a key means of implementing these commitments. So how can growth occur in a way which includes the poorest on good terms? These were the premises of the Conference ‘Incorporating Pro-Poorest Growth in the SDGs: Moving Beyond the MDGs’ implemented by CPAN and the Asian Development Bank in Manila in April 2016.
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Ensuring Escapes from Poverty are Sustained in Uganda
Since the early 1990s, Uganda has experienced substantial reductions in poverty. However, as people have moved out of poverty, the number of people living at a level less than twice the poverty line—termed the ‘insecure non-poor’ in the Ugandan context—has risen. This report focuses on ‘transitory poverty escapes’, i.e., on those households which, having successfully escaped from poverty, return to living in it once again. Specifically, it examines why some households are able to escape poverty and remain out of it—that is, they experience sustained escapes from poverty—while others escape poverty only to return to living in it again in the future.
Authors: Lucy Scott, Vidya Diwakar, Moses Okech
Read MoreAnti-discrimination policies and programmes in low-and middle-income countries: Experiences in political participation, education and labour markets
This report presents the findings of a rigorous review of evidence on anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies and legislation in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). It focuses on three areas: political participation, education and labour markets.
Authors: Rachel Marcus, Anna Mdee and Ella Page
Read MoreFinancial Inclusion Policy Guide: Enhanced Resilience through Savings and Insurance via Linkages and Digital Technology
The objective of this policy guide is to provide policymakers and programme designers with an up-to-date view of what needs to be done to include the poorest people in financial services, and by doing so make a dent in their poverty. It selects savings and insurance as two aspects of financial services that are most likely to build poor people’s resilience in the face of the multiple risks they face – a necessary precursor to any investments they might make to get out of poverty.
Read MorePolicy Brief: Financial Inclusion in Nigeria
This policy brief provides a situation analysis on financial inclusion in Nigeria, including a short analysis of how it may figure in chronic poverty, and processes of escaping poverty and impoverishment. It also goes on to assess the relevance of the four potential promising avenues identified in the global CPAN Financial inclusion Policy Guide (Smith et al 2015) for including the poorest people in Nigeria. This leads to a commentary on the e Nigerian Financial Inclusion Strategy.
Read MoreGetting to Zero: Tackling Extreme Poverty through Private Sector Development Policy Guide
This policy guide aims at identifying those interventions that best promote entrepreneurship among the poor in a way that puts them on trajectories out of poverty. For some, these interventions can contribute to sustained poverty escapes; for others, they mean faster upward mobility to the poverty line.
Read MorePolicy Brief - Getting to Zero: Tackling Extreme Poverty through Private Sector Development
This policy brief looks at the two key challenges for a pro-poor private sector development strategy: the creation of decent jobs; and the promotion of (formal and informal) micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) with the potential for growth and transformation.
Read MoreChallenge Paper 3: Poverty focus in selected Swedish bilateral aid portfolios
This paper analyses 12 Swedish bilateral country programmes of development cooperation and the extent to which they are focusing on interventions assessed to be effective in fighting poverty, according to the Chronic Poverty Report (CPR) 2014-2015 and other research findings.
Read MoreStrengthening social justice to address intersecting inequalities post-2015
The people most likely to be left behind by development are those facing ‘intersecting inequalities’, or economic deficits intersecting with discrimination and exclusion on the grounds of identity and locational disadvantage.
The experience of seven countries (Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, India, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Nepal) shows that key ingredients for addressing intersecting inequalities are: social movements demanding changes in the ‘rules of the game’; political trajectories and processes of constitutional change that facilitate and actualize these changes; social guarantees, opportunity enhancements and developmental affirmative actions as well as specific policies and programmes which show commitment to reduce intersecting inequalities over time.
The post-2015 agenda can help establish global norms which will support and encourage mobilisation to tackle intersecting inequalities, including a strong commitment to universal quality basic services, and the development of country-specific frameworks of targets and indicators monitoring intersecting inequalities
Authors: Veronica Paz Arauco, Haris Gazdar, Paula Hevia-Pacheco, Naila Kabeer, Amanda Lenhardt, Syeda Quratulain Masood, Haider Naqvi, Nandini Nayak, Andrew Norton, Nidhi Sadana Sabharwal, Elisa Scalise, Andrew Shepherd, Deepak Thapa, Sukhadeo Thorat, D. Hien Tran, Leandro Vergara-Camus, Tassew Woldehanna, Chiara Mariotti.
Click here to download the Report
The following background papers prepared for the report are also available:
Pakistan (Gazdar, Masood and Naqvi)
Latin America (Hevia and Vergara-Camus)
Translating Growth into Poverty Reduction.Beyond the Numbers
Edited by Flora Kessy, Oswald Mashindano, Andrew Shepherd & Lucy Scott
Tanzania is a politically stable, much aided country that has consistently grown economically during the first decade of the millennium, while also improving its human development indicators. However, poverty has remained persistent, particularly within rural areas. This collaborative work delves into the reasons why this is so and what can be done to improve the record.
The book is the product of both Tanzanian and international poverty experts, based on largely qualitative research undertaken within Tanzania by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC). The authors highlight and discuss the importance of macro- and micro-level causes of the persistence of poverty. The latter, on which the book is focused, centre around a negative dynamic affecting a large number of poor households in which widespread failure to provide household food security undermines gender relationships and reduces the possibility of saving and asset accumulation which is necessary for escaping poverty. This results in very low upward mobility. Vulnerability is widespread and resilience against shocks minimal, even for those who are not absolutely poor. Through an in-depth and broad analysis of poverty in Tanzania, the book provides alternative conclusions to those often repeated in the poverty discourse in international and local arenas.
The conclusions were reached with the specific aim of informing political and policy debates within Tanzania.
Financial inclusion and chronic poverty: access to savings and insurance services in Tanzania
This brief examines the current extent of financial inclusion in Tanzania – focusing particularly on the chronically poor – and also specifically on access to savings and insurance services. This is because of the increasing body of evidence about the role which the two services can play in helping households to escape poverty and, by implication, to manage shocks and build their resilience.
Authors: Lucy Scott and William Smith
Photo Credit: Panos Pictures
Read MoreA place for panel data in the 'data revolution'?
This paper argues that panel data provides important insights to measure progress towards zero poverty, including through identifying who is getting 'left behind'.
Authors: Lucy Scott and Chiara Mariotti
Read MoreMiddle-income Countries Policy Guide: Addressing chronic poverty in middle-income countries: getting close to zero
Middle-income countries (MICs) are home to the majority of the world’s extremely poor people. However, some have also achieved remarkable success in reducing chronic poverty, and have been a source of inspiration for developing countries as a whole.
This Policy Guide is targeted to policymakers in middle- and lower-income Countries (MICs and LICs) who would like to be inspired and learn lessons from the countries that have reduced chronic poverty as part of their efforts to accelerate structural transformation and achieve a higher growth path. The Guide provides recommendations on how countries can replicate this achievement using lessons learnt from ten selected MICs with greatest poverty reduction record since 1990 (Cape Verde, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Senegal, Viet Nam, Brazil, China, Thailand and Tunisia). Evidence is analysed to identify the policies, strategies and political trajectories that have characterised their route out of extreme poverty.
Authors: Dominik Bulla, Abdou Salam Fall, Haris Gazdar, Medhi Krongkaew, Amanda Lenhardt, Sami Mouley, Alina Rocha Menocal, Andrew Shepherd and Chiara Mariotti
Click here to download the Middle-income Countries Policy Guide