ABSTRACT
The launching of the new international poverty reduction strategies is an enormous challenge for the international community. The initiative is based, amongst other things, on two key observations: the scale of poverty in some regions such as sub-Saharan Africa where nearly half of the inhabitants live in extreme poverty; the progression of the affliction, with the deterioration of living conditions in many countries. According to the World Bank, the number of poor people (based on the threshold of two dollars per day) increased throughout the world in the 1990s, except in the Latin American region where it stagnated and in eastern Asia and the Pacific where it fell.
