Suchergebnisse

This paper examines efforts to bridge multi-disciplinary research, policy engagement and practice to improve the life quality of children living in poverty in diverse developing country contexts. The paper is based on the experiences of Young Lives and draws on insights from the four participating countries (Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam). It pays particular attention to the work of the Ethiopia team in making children's issues central ("mainstreaming" children) to the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper process. The first part of the paper discusses the importance of examining and understanding the policy environment to influence policy effectively for and with children. The second part considers Young Lives practice in Ethiopia in outlining key ingredients necessary for successful research-based advocacy: a) the importance of credible research quality; b) intent to shape policy; c) understanding the socio-political context in which the research will be taken up; d) identifying and networking with key governmental organisation and NGO actors; e) the importance of framing messages in a context-appropriate way. The authors also offer a number of insights based on Young Lives work in Ethiopia, on the timing of policy engagement; the politics of bridging research and policy; the value of long-term partnerships between NGOs and researchers; securing stakeholder buy-in; investing in capacity building; and the particular challenges of working on children's and macro-development issues.

This report presents the findings of the Government-initiated review of the national poverty target, first set out in the National Action Plan for Social Inclusion 2007-2016. The review finds that the significant progress towards the interim target between 2005 and 2008 (a reduction of 40 per cent in consistent poverty) has been set back by the economic recession, despite the strong performance of welfare payments in cushioning the social impact of the crisis. Nonetheless, for one lifecycle group, older people, the target has been met, though most others, notably children and the unemployed, remain far from the target. The review examines the indicators used to define the target population and concludes that consistent poverty should continue to be the policy priority. It proposes that additional indicators, which capture emerging poverty risks, should be used to monitor progress towards the target. The review considers the interaction between the national and EU poverty targets and suggests ways by which they could be better aligned. Finally, the review considers the changed economic and policy context for implementing the national poverty target and argues for better linkages between social and economic policies, more emphasis on activation and service delivery, and a stronger focus on children and jobless households. The review concludes by setting out the Government-approved recommendations for revising the national poverty target.

AbstractIn recent times there have been a proliferation of national, sectoral and local development policies on poverty eradication in the developing countries. This study of the Jamaican poverty reduction initiative aimed to find out whether some of these programmes have transcended some of the elementary policy problems that have been widely covered in the development management literature since the 1960s. The Government of Jamaica contends that its overall social policy, and especially the National Poverty Eradication Programme (NPEP), instituted from 1997–2000 may have contributed towards the reduction of absolute poverty levels that have been recorded in the last half‐decade. This writer argues otherwise. This is because a close examination of the management of the NPEP per se revealed deep‐seated problems. These included a weak political analysis, poor co‐ordination at the macro and street levels and a lack of adequate institutional support from the bureaucracy. The essay suggests ways towards improved governance. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

[Introduction] Debate about national and international poverty measurement continued to evolve (see for example, Abu-Ismail et al., 2012). The basic question of how many poor people there are in the world generally assumes that poverty is measured according to international poverty lines (IPLs). Yet, an equally relevant question could be how many poor people there are in the world, based on how poverty is defined where those people live. In short, rather than a comparison based on monetary values, the latter question is germane to estimates based on a concept - 'poverty' - as defined by countries' specific circumstances and institutions. Clearly, in such case global metrics such as the IPL of US$1.25/day - the construction of which is ultimately based on a pool of 15 national poverty lines (NPLs) - could be less informative (see Chen and Ravallion (2008) for details and Deaton (2010) for critique). Furthermore, as Deaton (2011: 17) has noted, estimates of poverty by NPLs and IPLs operate within quite different policy spaces: "…global measures of development (.) operate in an entirely different political environment than do domestic measures. The latter (.) feed into domestic policymaking are typically subject to oversight procedures that constrain both the statisticians who produce the data and the politicians and policymakers who use them." This begs the question as to whether poverty viewed with an IPL lens looks quite different from poverty viewed from countries themselves using the NPL. Thus an important question is how different are national and international poverty line estimates? By addressing the question of poverty as defined where those poor people live, this paper seeks to offer a new perspective on global poverty and at the same time extend thinking on the 'middle-income countries poverty paradox' - meaning that most of the world's poor people do not live in the world's poorest countries (Sumner 2010; 2012a). Indeed, one could ask whether such patterns are more or less pronounced when one considers ...