F-Crisis

One of the highest priorities of international development is to reduce poverty. In recent years, the definition of poverty has evolved together with a better understanding of the nature of poverty itself and its underlying determinants.

Current poverty reduction strategies operate within the broad context of an international debate on public policy, which is supported by a number of important initiatives and discourses. This chapter presents some of the most important among them as well as the poverty reduction strategies of major multilateral and bilateral organizations. While there is much variation among them, the approaches to poverty reduction described here all reflect recent progress in understanding poverty and seek to improve poverty alleviation through enhanced planning, coordination and national ownership. In some cases, these approaches give democratic governance and decentralization a leading role in poverty reduction.

The overarching goal of UNCDF is to help reduce poverty through local development programmes and microfi nance operations. Its ‗strategic results framework‘ (see Inset 4) implicitly stresses the linkages between activities of good governance and multi-dimensional measures for poverty reduction. Its intervention is characterized by a model of local governance, based on building partnerships with programme country governments, local authorities and communities. The operations of UNCDF‘s Local Governance Unit (LGU) are designed to support the institutions of local governance in a limited number of LDCs (see Annex) and, particularly, to strengthen the capacities, responsiveness and accountability of elected local governments. UNCDF‘s specifi c objective in this area is to achieve direct poverty reduction and improved local governance.