SAGA Proposal: Research Themes

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SAGA Research Proposal:

1.2 Research Themes

Thinking about poverty has evolved significantly in the past 20 years (Kanbur and Squire 2001). The traditional approach, which in many ways remains dominant in policy analyses, views poverty as the lack of command over material resources sufficient to meet basic needs. Sen’s seminal work (1979, 1985, 1987) redefines poverty as deprivation in terms of capabilities which are intrinsically important, such as education, good health, and freedom. In this view, income remains important instrumentally, because to some extent it can buy these capabilities, but poverty should be measured in other dimensions that address capabilities directly. Practical research that attempts to take the capabilities approach seriously include the UNDP’s Human Development Index (UNDP 1994) as well as more general research that considers multiple dimensions of poverty simultaneously (Sahn, Stifel, and Younger 1999; Duclos, Sahn, and Younger 2001). More recently, a large number of participatory poverty assessments, mostly conducted in Africa, have found that the poor themselves often define poverty in terms of vulnerability and powerlessness (Narayan et.al 2000a; Narayan et.al. 2000b).

The topics that are most suitable for research under this Cooperative Agreement take each of these ways of thinking about poverty into account. Increasing the poor’s access to and use of education and health services, reducing their vulnerability, and increasing their voice are the keys to a bottom-up development strategy that will produce both growth and poverty reduction. In the sections that follow, we discuss each of these topics, and potential research projects related to them, in turn.

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