Poverty in Ethiopia – Arithmetic fairytale

How an interim report about poverty alarmingly omits the poor from its index and declares a decline in poverty.

 Hone Mandefro

 With the start of the new millennium in the year 2000, the World Bank and IMF replaced the decades-old Structural Adjustment Programs with Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) as the basis for their lending. It was part of the effort to mitigate the negative consequences of poverty reduction policies in countries struggling to sustain a sound economic development.

Since then more than a dozen developing countries have written different rounds of poverty reduction strategy papers followed by monitoring and evaluation system of their implementations.