Tackling rural poverty, together

Extract

More than 70 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas.The World Bank’s approach to rural development is holistic and multisectoral, focused on improving the wellbeing of rural people by building their productive, social, and environmental assets. The author of this article explores what this means in the longer term horizon of beyond 2015.

The proposition of this article is that key [...], in fact the foundation, will be sustained economic growth. First, without economic growth, incomes will not increase for anyone, including the poor. Although growth does not guarantee poverty reduction, poverty reduction is impossible without growth. What will fuel this growth? The starting point for many developing countries, given the concentration of poverty in rural areas and the share of agriculture in poor country GDP, must be rural development and growth in agricultural production.