Dr. Vijayendra Rao, Lead Economist in the Research Department of the World Bank, will deliver the keynote address of the International Workshop on Social Inclusion and Poverty Eradication.
Community-driven development approaches are widely used to address persistent poverty and social exclusion in developing countries. Their goal is to harness local capacities for collective action to help people help themselves. In practice such approaches have been criticized for being poorly managed and subject to elite dominance and capture, particularly when implemented on a large scale. The Active Development approach is an attempt to address this by (a) integrating social and economic theory to diagnose problems and design better interventions, (b) develop nimble approaches to large-scale management which allow interventions to adapt to different contexts and trajectories of change, and (c) to give citizens the ability to collect and analyze their own data, and employ deliberative processes of decision making, to make them informed and active co-producers of policy design and implementation. This talk will discuss the work of the World Bank’s Social Observatory team in India that has been developing the Active Development approach with women’s self-help groups for the last five years.
A reception will follow in the CES Atrium from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.
