ABSTRACT

This book poses some difficult questions, the overarching one being: ‘What can poor people in rural areas do to improve their livelihoods?’ At the heart of this question is one of the most intractable problems in development – how to improve the prospects of the roughly one billion who have been left behind in rural areas by the rising living standards in the developing world? The answer to this question is important because, as the scenario modelling exercise in the introduction suggests, the problem will not go away without active intervention.