Living with Poverty. No. 493.

The Millennium Development Goals aim to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015. But for many low-income countries, debt relief and multilateral aid hinge on developing a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) - an approach promoted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Panos London is examining the effectiveness of the PRSP process, in particular the engagement of the poor in the development and implementation of these strategies, and the role of the media in enhancing transparency, accountability and ownership of the process.

As part of this, we worked with partners to collect a series of oral testimonies from communities in Pakistan, Zambia, Kenya and Mozambique, for whom poverty is a daily reality.Oral history.Living with Poverty.

Their accounts - vivid and direct, full of detail - are a powerful reminder of the human indignities that lie at the heart of poverty and why effective approaches to poverty reduction matter.
These testimonies are a powerful reminder of the human indignities that lie at the heart of poverty and why effective approaches to poverty reduction matter.

The narrators present their own perspectives on the factors that keep people poor, the ingenuity needed to meet basic needs, and the challenges they face in pursuing their rights. Above all, their stories bring to life the reality of poverty and its daily oppressions.

Living with Poverty is a project of Panos London.

Panos London stimulates informed and inclusive public debate around key development issues in order to foster sustainable development. We are working to promote an enabling media and communications environment worldwide.

Our aim is to ensure that the perspectives of the people whose lives are most affected by development (mainly the poor and marginalised) are included within decision-making and that decisions are subject to their scrutiny and debate.

Our priority issues are: media and communications, globalisation, HIV/AIDS, environment and conflict. We see gender as integral to all these.