ABSTRACT
Poverty reduction strategies and programs cannot be effective and sustainable unless they systematically take the perceptions and opinions of the poor into account. Even when projects fail to meet their objectives by all our standard criteria, sometimes elements in those interventions—for example, involving poor people in making decisions and choices more effectively—provide us with important lessons for poverty reduction. At the same time, some projects that do not have explicit poverty reduction objectives can help alleviate poverty. In the water sector, for example, improving the water supply can result in better outcomes in terms of the health status of poor people than health projects do. The major concern at this conference is how to go about a proper and effective impact assessment of projects, programs, and policies. Of course, the major difficulty resides in the definition of poverty, because of its multifaceted character.
