Escaping Poverty Traps Conference
February 26 - 27, 2009
Washington, D.C.
Escaping Poverty Traps Conference
J.W. Marriott Hotel, 1331 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, D.C.
For a complete agenda, links to conference material and registration details, please visit the conference site.
The conference responds to the challenge to USAID and other development assistance agencies to find mechanisms to connect the poor, especially the chronically poor, to economic growth. Too often development assistance only reaches this group in the form of emergency assistance delivered in times of crisis. While important, emergency assistance is not designed to ameliorate chronic poverty. But what will work? Are there programs, and ways of implementing programs, that will include the chronically poor population in economic growth? The Escaping Poverty Traps Conference will address these questions, giving special attention to the agricultural growth opportunities found in the rural environments which are home to the vast majority of the world’s chronically poor.
The conference will convene a wide-ranging and stimulating group of researchers and practitioners. The conference will be framed by presentations of the Chronic Poverty Report, 2008/2009, USAID’s Affordable Food for All vision for meeting food challenge and Senator Richard G. Lugar’s discussion of new US legislative initiatives on agricultural development and foreign assistance. Other conference highlights include:
- Discussions of innovative pilot programs that use novel savings and insurance instruments to crowd-in technology adoption and productive savings
- Analysis of the relationship between growth and chronic poverty reduction
- Case studies and analysis of social protection programs and efforts to make them economically productive
- Prospects for redesigning food aid to improve its impacts on both source and recipient communities
- Lessons on how to transfer productive assets to the poor and how to successfully incorporate marginal producers into input and output markets
The conference will close with a roundtable featuring leading individuals from governments, bilateral and multi-lateral donors, the private sector and members of the NGO and academic communities. Recommendations from the roundtable and other conference session will be combined into a final conference report on ways that USAID can deepen its approach to chronic food insecurity and poverty.