Over the last decade Latin America and the Caribbean region has achieved important progress towards the World Bank Group's goals of eradicating extreme poverty and boosting income growth of the bottom 40 percent, propelled by remarkable economic growth and falling income inequality. Despite this...

Lifting people out of poverty is one of the great challenges facing the international community today. It has become still more daunting in the context of the global financial crisis, which has severe implications for the poorest people in the world. Almost 1.4 billion people in developing...

By most measures, the 2000s were one of the most impressive decades for economic development in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). With the exception of 2009, the region s gross domestic product per capita grew consistently at an average rate of 2.5 percent between 2000 and 2012. During the...

Currently, no rigorous tool exists to measure the poverty level of microfinance institution (MFI) clients. In order to gain more transparency on the depth of poverty outreach, CGAP collaborated with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to design and test a simple, low-cost...

This study focuses on people who moved out of poverty during the decade from 1995 to 2005 in rural areas of four Indian states: Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal. It also considers people who have fallen into poverty, those who have remained poor, and some who have never been...

For two decades, Africa’s strong economic growth has paved the way for poverty reduction. Nevertheless, high chronic poverty levels persist, and the gap between income groups in terms of human capital and access to basic services is growing. Also, poor households are vulnerable to frequent...

This book focuses on the World Bank's experience with Participatory Poverty Assessments (PPAs). Some practitioners have argued that a number of World Bank PPAs should not be included because they were extractive, did not influence policy, and were not participatory. However, both good and bad...

The purpose of this study, carried out in the Kyrgyz Republic in 1999, was to investigate the impact of socioeconomic change on the characteristics and functions of the social networks of poor and non-poor households in rural and urban communities. A better understanding of the role of informal...

In 2013, the Board of Governors endorsed two new goals for the World Bank Group (WBG). First, the WBG would commit its full energies to bringing an effective end to extreme poverty by 2030. This means reducing to no more than 3 percent the fraction of the world’s population living on less than...

As the second book in a three-part series entitled Voices of the Poor, "Crying out for Change" accounts for the voices from comparative fieldwork among twenty three countries. Through participatory, and qualitative research methods, the book presents very directly, poor people's own voices, and...