John W. SewellThe alleviation of global poverty is once again beginning to capture theattention of the international community. World leaders are calling foran end to absolute poverty by the year 2000; aid agencies are redirect-ing staff and resources toward raising the living standards of thepoorest populations; and research and academic centers are refocusingon the design of poverty-oriented development strategies. Anti-poverty initiatives for the 1990s must, however, respond to adeveloping world and policy environment that in many ways differsfrom that of the 1970s and 1980s. Developing-country needs and ca-pabilities are changing, as are the policies and programs of foreign aiddonors. Despite considerable social and economic progress, the problem ofpoverty looms larger than ever. Roughly one in five of this planet's5 billion men, women, and children lives in absolute poverty, strug-gling with malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, infant mortality, and shortlife expectancy. Poverty trends, however, vary markedly from region toregion. In East and Southeast Asia, slower population growth rates andsteady advances in per capita income have contributed to a significantreduction in poverty. In South Asia, in contrast, where roughly half ofthe world's poor people live, more modest rates of growth have barelykept pace with the expanding population. And in Sub-Saharan Africa,where two-thirds of the people live in grinding poverty, the prospectsfor improvement are slight. Rapid population growth rates combinedwith sustained economic deterioration, falling or stagnant agriculturalproduction, and climatic crises all contribute to widespread malnutri-tion across Africa. In twenty African countries, the per capita caloricintake was lower in 1985 than two decades ago.1 In the recent past, moreover, the repercussions of internationaleconomic decline in the 1980s have halted--and in many African andLatin American countries actually reversed--many of the hard-wongains of earlier decades. For sixteen African and Latin Americancountries, per capita income was lower in 1985 than in 1965; and inanother dozen countries in these two regions it grew by less than I percent during ~he same twenty-year period.2 UNICEF's major study on the impact of the recession in the 1980s,Adjustment with a Human Face, found evidence that child welfare--and by extension, the "physical and mental capacity of much of the1X