Inside Poverty and Development in Africa: Critical Reflections on Pro-Poor Policies: 7 (African Dynamics) - Softcover

Review in: African Studies Review Vol. 53, no. 1.

'The book is a welcome attempt to combine nuanced understandings of conditions and strategies of the poor with current policies seeking to reduce poverty. It documents convincingly that there is substantial room for improvement in internationally acclaimed policies like the International Fund for Agricultural Development's "small-farmer" model of poverty reduction and the World Bank-promoted "Poverty Reduction Strategy" papers, as well as in policies of more national or even local origin such as natural resource management programs and urban by-laws. Moreover, several chapters are highly critical of the proposition that the formalization of property rights is of any help to the poor'.

Thinking about development in Africa requires an appreciation of at least two sets of ideas. It is not sufficient to stress the ubiquity of failure, malnutrition, disease, predatory states and war; one also has to recognize that important aspects of the lives of millions of ordinary people have been transformed over the last five decades. All contributions in this book give insight into the heterogeneity of poverty and development processes in Sub-Saharan Africa, and confront the ideas, concepts and assumptions that lie behind pro-poor policies with their empirical findings.