Engendering poverty alleviation: challenges and opportunities

Poverty eradication has re-emerged as an important item on the agenda of global development. As the contributions to this volume show, in recent years understandings of poverty and what constitutes well-being have been signi®cantly broadened. At the same time, what the volume also demonstrates is that the richness of concepts sits uncomfortably with the poverty of methods and data: the unresolved methodological problems that plague the measurement and analysis of poverty, especially from a gender perspective, and the lack of timely and reliable data. These are important considerations not only from an `academic' point of view, but also as far as the arena of public action is concerned, an arena which is becoming increasingly `knowledge-based'.