IFAD's comparative advantage lies in its experience in working at the grass-roots level, its understanding of the constraints facing rural poor people, including the most vulnerable, and its capacity to envisage inclusive approaches for socio-economic development. A key element of IFAD’s approach to development is providing support to rural smallholder organizations as a strategy for empowering...

The micro-credit programmes focus on organisation of the rural poor at the grassroots level through a process of social mobilization. It enables the poor build their own organisations (SHGs) consisting of 10-20 persons, in which they participate fully and directly and take decisions on all issues concerning poverty eradication. Micro-finance can be a powerful tool in initiating a cyclical proce...

1. This paper provides the framework for IDE’s approach to poverty reduction. It seeks to make explicit the assumptions underlying IDE’s efforts to integrate the rural poor into expanding input and output markets. Its aim is to demonstrate that there is a case for taking specific action to enable the poor—especially the rural poor—to participate in markets both as customers of purchased inputs,...

1. This paper provides the framework for IDE’s approach to poverty reduction. It seeks to make explicit the assumptions underlying IDE’s efforts to integrate the rural poor into expanding input and output markets. Its aim is to demonstrate that there is a case for taking specific action to enable the poor—especially the rural poor—to participate in markets both as customers of purchased inputs,...

Research shows households are more likely to be poor in rural versus urban America. Does this phenomenon partly reflect that people who choose rural residence have unmeasured attributes related to human impoverishment? To address this, two models are estimated using Panel Study of Income Dynamics data. A single equation Probit model of household poverty replicates the well-documented finding of...

The plight of rural people has been highlighted by numerous policy studies and considerable public awareness has been created via the media. Whereas 50% of the population of South Africa is rural, the rural areas contain 72% of those members of the total population who are poor. Compared to their urban counterparts, rural people also have vastly inferior access to basic social services and the ...

Rural People’s Perception of Poverty in China Subjective Poverty Line methodology is applied to rural China 2002 using a sample from 22 provinces. Respondents were asked two questions: one on amount of food necessary and another on amount of cash necessary for their households. The respondent’s perception of how much cash is needed varies profoundly and positively by income in the county where ...

Satellite imagery is a form of big data that can be harnessed for many social good applications, especially those focusing on rural areas. In this article, we describe the common problem of selecting sites for and planning rural development activities as informed by remote sensing and satellite image analysis. Effective planning in poor rural areas benefits from information that is not availabl...