Escaping Poverty and Chronic Poverty through Rural Development

This study explored the role of the Millennium Villages Project intervention in agriculture as an escape route out of poverty and chronic poverty in rural Kenya. A Key constraint to addressing poverty has been the apparent failure to properly identify the poor and target programmes and interventions appropriately. There is need to develop a clear understanding of who the poor are, the constraints they face and the processes that engender and retrench their poverty. This calls for a renewed rural development strategy that addresses a rural situation that is different from the past, a rural population that confronts new problems, especially the challenges and opportunities in agriculture as a pathway out of poverty. The study's conclusion is that the ability of the poor to engage in productive activities in a sustainable manner and the prospects of ‘development intervention’ in rural areas depend heavily on the wider socio-economic, political and institutional environment within and beyond the rural domain. Policy recommendations in this book would be of interest to governance experts, policy makers, planners, researchers and students in the social sciences.