Background Reports

The U.N.'s current Millennium Development Goals are to cut the number of people living in poverty by half by the year 2015 and to reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day. The department that is in charge of working on the poverty reduction project is the United Nation's Development Programme. In order to meet it's ambitious goals and time lines the UNDP has developed several strategies for dealing with the problem of worldwide poverty. The UNDP has developed five main strategies:

• Policy advice and technical support

• Strengthening capacity of institutions and individuals

• Advocacy, communications, and public information

• Promoting and brokering dialogue

• Knowledge networking and sharing of good practices

The UNDP is not working alone on this crucial issue. Some of the actors that are helping the UNDP include local governments and the International Poverty Centre. The International Poverty Centre is a joint project between UNDP and the Brazilian Government that promotes South-South Cooperation on applied poverty research, and by its network of over 166 country offices.

UNDP's work on the strategies and policies for poverty reduction is anchored in three basic principles - the multidimensionality of poverty, the centrality of gender equality and the critical importance of an integrated approach. They believe that economic growth is necessary for sustained poverty reduction, but it is not a sufficient condition. The quality of economic growth is as important as the rate of growth. Poor people should not only benefit equitably from economic growth, they should have the opportunity to actively contribute to its generation.

While the UNDP has made some significant progress, it still has a significant way to go. As of 2005 more than billion people live on less than a dollar a day. As of 2002 in Northern Africa and Western Asia 19.4% of the people live on less than a dollar a day, in Latin America and the Caribbean it's 44%, and in South-Eastern Asia and Oceania 31.2% of the people live on less than a dollar a day. One important feature of the UNDP's policies is the way in which they distribute grants to states. In order to be eligible for a grant the state needs to be able to show that they have good governance and that they would be able to use the money properly. One region that has a particularly difficult time with this is Africa. Many African countries have had a hard time qualifying for the grants.