ABSTRACT
Of the forty-eight sub-Saharan African countries which were member of the United Nations in 1997, thirty-one possessed consistent sets of national statistics and had more than half of their population classified as rural dwellers (World Bank, 1999). The combined population of these thirty-one countries accounted for nearly 500 million of the estimated 600 million people living in sub-Saharan Africa. However, although rural development had been adopted by the World Bank as a poverty-focused project-level intervention in 1973, it was as rapidly abandoned by the Bank and several other major donors in the early 1980s in the context of the second OPEC oil price shock and other associated adverse international changes. After two decades of structural adjustment, the second of which saw the Bank’s ‘New Poverty Agenda’, the role of the rural sector in development and poverty reduction strategies remains unspecified. On the questions of poverty causality and the choice of poverty-reducing development strategies there is little agreement.
