On October 19, 2005, a Seminar on Attacking Extreme Poverty, organized by ATD Fourth World International Movement and the World Bank and funded by the Belgian Poverty Reduction Partnership Program, took place at World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC. The main objective of the event was to better understand the life of people living in extreme poverty, what is needed to reach them, and why tackling these objectives represents a challenge for the World Bank.
The goal of the second part of the seminar, chaired by Katherine Marshall, Director for Development Dialogue on Values and Ethics for the World Bank, was to assess the implications of the discussions held during the day for the work of the Bank, the Fourth World Movement, and other organizations for the reduction of extreme poverty.
The panel was introduced by Eugen Brand, Director General, International Movement ATD Fourth World, who reiterated the importance of considering poor people as true partners if we are to build comprehensive knowledge on poverty and exclusion. Steen Jorgensen, Director for Social Development of Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development (ESSD) for the World Bank, in turn spoke about the need of the Bank to find better instruments for understanding power and network relations and how micro experiences of individual families living in poverty can relate to policy level interventions.
Panelists in this session were Luca Barbone, Director for Poverty Reduction of Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM) for the Bank; and Deepa Narayan, Senior Advisor for PREM; and Christopher Winship, Professor of sociology, Harvard University. Comments were made on the necessity of studying more profoundly the target group that is being addressed instead of focusing on the channel from poverty to nonpoverty. Winship reiterated the importance of better understanding the political, institutional, and cultural structures of countries for the Bank to be successful in its initiatives.
The open discussion was chaired by Marshal and focused on the need of a two-way conversation between the Bank and the poor people it serves.
