[Soasiastudents] REMINDER: Anirudh Krishna's Office Hours: Oct 13, 10-11:30 AM, Thom 403

[Juned Shaikh]

Dear all,

   Anirudh Krishna will be holding "office hours" for UW students this Friday. So those of us who are interested in issues like development, public policy, poverty, social capital etc., can make use of the opportunity to meet him.

   He'll hold his office hours in Thomson 403 between 10:00 - 11:30 AM on October 13 (Friday). There are no sign up sheets for the office hours.

   Anirudh Krishna will be here as a speaker for a seminar series organized by CSDE. The details of his paper, and his brief biography, are pasted below.

  Thanks,
  Juned

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Anirudh Krishna: "The Making and Unmaking of Poverty: Results from Five Countries and 25,000 Households"
Friday, Oct. 13, 12:30 – 2:00 PM, Parrington Commons, UW Seattle Campus

Abstract of the paper

Even as some households are coming out of poverty, other households are concurrently falling into poverty.  New poverty is being made even as some old poverty is unmade.

A bottom-up methodology for studying poverty was developed to help examine movements out of and into poverty at the grassroots level.  Poverty dynamics were tracked within 212 rural communities of India, Kenya, Uganda, Peru, and North Carolina, USA for a total of more than 25,000 households, and detailed interviews were conducted with a subset of over 7,000 households.  These investigations revealed that (a) escape from poverty and descent into poverty have occurred simultaneously in every community; (b) large numbers of households have fallen into poverty even as large numbers have escaped from poverty; (c) even quite well-to-do households have fallen into abiding poverty; and (d) the set of factors associated with escapes out of poverty differs from the set of factors associated with descents into poverty.

Two separate sets of poverty policies are required: one set of policies to facilitate households’ escapes out of poverty, and another set of policies to head off descents into poverty.  Preventing descents into poverty more effectively should become a key component of the strategy for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Yet, preventing poverty is mostly neglected: governments’ strategies and those of donors are primarily concerned with raising people out of poverty.

About Anirudh Krishna:

Anirudh Krishna is an assistant professor of public policy studies at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Duke University. His research interests are in rural development, democracy and poverty. He has also published work on social capital in poor countries, including India, Kenya and Peru.

He has a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University, and masters degrees in International Development and Economics from Cornell University and the Delhi School of Economics, respectively.

His most recent book, "Active Social Capital: Tracing the Roots of Development and Democracy" was published in 2002 by Columbia University Press, New York, and by Oxford University Press, New Delhi. He is co-author of "Reasons For Success: Learning from Instructive Experiences in Rural Development" (Kumarian, 1998), co-editor of "Reasons For Hope: Instructive Experiences in Rural Development" (Kumarian, 1997), and editor of "Changing Policy and Practice From Below: Community Experiences in Poverty Reduction" (United Nations 2000).

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Juned Shaikh,
Ph.D. Student,
Department of History,
University of Washington.
juneds at u.washington.edu