Replicating Successes in Poverty Reduction

Ryan Streeter makes two interesting points in his post on successes of making poverty history.  First, he notes that despite what everyone may perceive about poverty eradication, over the past several decades we have achieved tremendous successes in reducing absolute poverty around the world.   Building on this, he concludes that many of the efforts to “rethink”, “rebuild”, and “redesign” development approaches are probably misguided.  Instead, we should pay greater attention to things that have actually worked over the past 40 years and try to replicate them.

Speaking of development approaches that work.  Check out remarks by Greg Lebedev on dilemmas of development assistance and why institutional reform, rather than humanitarian assistance, is key to long-term sustainable development and poverty eradication.