Antipoverty Programs, Asset-Based

Poverty is a situation that prevents one from enjoying one’s basic rights, and leads to further denial of one’s choices and capacity. Eradicating poverty is one of the aims of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The multidimensional focus of the MDGs has encouraged attention to focus on a range of dimensions of poverty, including building capabilities such as education, health, water, and sanitation. According to the World Bank, three ways to tackle poverty are promoting economic opportunity, facilitating political empowerment, and enhancing economic security. Asset-based antipoverty programs fall under the first category. An asset is anything of value that can be converted into cash.

Asset-based antipoverty programs may be of two types: individual asset-endowment programs, whereby a polity consciously plans to provide productive and remunerative assets to a poor person or family; and community asset-creation programs, whereby attempts are made to generate community assets to be enjoyed generally by the community and particularly by the poor: the latter directly gain from wages that they earn while creating the assets. The second category of programs is also alternatively described as employment guarantee programs, or wage-employment programs.

The two types of asset-based programs have attracted varying degrees of loyalty from policymakers and scholars in different countries. Some countries, policymakers, and scholars support the individual asset endowment programs because they believe that unless a poor family is endowed with permanent productive assets, it cannot stay above the poverty line on a sustainable basis. On the other hand, the community asset creation-cum-wage employment program loyalists believe that individual asset creation cannot be viable in an imperfect market: they argue that in the absence of forward and backward linkages, and without being aided by an enabling and supportive environment, a poor family cannot gainfully continue to enjoy productive assets in the long run. These policymakers and scholars therefore contend that societies should rather aim to produce community assets (for example, roads, embankments, and ponds) because such social assets have direct impact on reduction of infrastructural deprivations of the poor, whereas the latter also earn wages (sometimes combined with food) in the process.