Economic Strengthening Pathways for the Bottom Billion: Connecting the Dots

This report summarizes the main issues raised during the e-Consultation, “Economic-Strengthening Pathways for the Bottom Billion: Connecting the Dots,” sponsored by Poverty Outreach Working Group of The SEEP Network, May 17–19, 2011. 

The e-Consultation brought practitioners from different economic development disciplines together in order to learn about one another’s recent innovations in reaching the very poor and helping them move along an economic-strengthening pathway toward increased economic self-reliance and growth. By better understanding various dimensions of extreme poverty and identifying different segments within very poor populations, e-Consultation participants started to lay a foundation for a common conceptual framework for economic strengthening. This framework reveals relevant entry points for different interventions and services along a pathway from extreme poverty to economic self-reliance.