Unpacking the malady of Pro-Poor!

What do people mean by pro-poor and how is it interpreted in the real world of policy implementation?

A recent study conducted by PPLPI attempting to capture livestock policy worldviews of 22 policy agents through primary research conducted in Madhya Pradesh, New Delhi and United Kingdom threw some light on this pivotal issue.

Pro–Poor meant for a farmer a scheme through which they could earn enough for their meals and regain dignity and strength and provide food for their children. For a Paravet, it meant supply of quick services, for a field veterinarian it meant fulfilling a government target of animal treatment or artificial insemination (with a assumed relation between AI = poverty reduction), for a senior government bureaucrat it meant merging state livestock needs with centralised policies and fighting drudgery and corruption within the department. For a technocrat pro-poor meant endowments, livelihoods, value chains, capabilities and most importantly incomes and for a politician it meant the realization that while farmers needs might be different, history in the form of past successes like green and white revolution defined strategies of pro-poor.

What exactly is pro-poor then? Are they strategies, policies, concepts, approaches or worldviews? In the end the only authority holding the actual answer are the farmers themselves….. the elusive stakeholders who areseen but whose voices are often distilled within the jargonistic world of scientific policy postulations and conceptual deliberations.

Contributed by - SA PPLPP Coordination Team