Assessment of Internal Empowerment at The Group Level

Abstract

A poverty analysis carried out by the World Bank in 1990 indicated that farming families with less than 2 hectares of land, traditional inputs and practices, insecure tenure and no access to irrigation or off-far incomes were the most impoverished, ill and vulnerable segment of the population. Four districts in the west and three in the east of the country, each with a population of about 1.2 million were found to have the highest concentration of this type of population, some 25 percent of households with an average of 6 members. AGDEV, your NGO, was specifically established to improve the livelihoods of the most vulnerable members of society. It used the World Bank findings to initiate a pilot project to see what could be done to both improve agricultural productivity and reduce vulnerability of this type of rural group.