Eastern and Southern Africa

This Report is a product of the staff of IFAD and the judgements made herein do not necessarily reflect the views of its Member Countries or the representatives of those Member Countries appointed to its Executive Board. IFAD does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this publication and accepts no responsibility whatsoever for any consequence of their use. Designations employed in this Report and the presentation of the material in the maps do not imply the expression of any opinion, on the part of IFAD, concerning the legal status of any country or territory, or the delineation of its frontiers. FOREWORD FOREWORD Since its founding in 1978, IFAD has focused its efforts on poverty reduction in rural areas of the developing world. At that time, and for a number of years thereafter, IFAD's voice was a rather lonely one in the international community. To the extent that poverty reduction was on the international agenda, it was generally believed that general economic development and favourable policy frameworks would be sufficient to lift poor nations out of poverty. During much of the 1980s, in Africa and elsewhere, " getting prices right " became the overarching theme for advocates of structural adjustment. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as adjustment efforts stalled in many countries – sometimes exacerbating social tensions – and researchers began to detect differential impacts of adjustment on social groups, poverty problems became more visible and calls for social safety nets became more pronounced. Yet it remained largely unappreciated that the poor could respond to appropriate incentives and become agents of growth but that they would also need interventions specially tailored to their needs. Safety nets were frequently regarded as either charity or a means of buying political stability. That poverty reduction should be the central theme of the economic and social development efforts of governments and the international community , and that it was potentially a very wise investment, was not yet acknowledged. This changed in the latter half of the 1990s. The 1995 World Social Summit placed poverty reduction squarely on the global development agenda. The development community called for a halving of global poverty by the year 2015. Poverty reduction is now an overarching goal for governments and international donors, and its centrality was reconfirmed at the Millennium Summit in 2000. It is now generally acknowledged that growth can only be truly sustainable …