The answer to this depends on one's vantage point. The Southern community point of view, as the ultimate recipient of aid, is to use aid to acquire the means to sustainably overcome various constraints that ultimately have a bearing on their poverty status. This is necessary to put in place capacities that will ultimately allow onslaughts on poverty that are energised from within. Conversely, all this is disproportionately owned by a minority within the community leading to wide disparities and skewed power relations within the community. The challenge, then, is not only that of material provisioning, but also dislodging powerful status quo vested interests.
Women are almost always part of the disempowered class.
While this is a characteristic of almost all poor communities, the above restrictions on women are, in some cases, also reinforced by cultural norms. A third characteristic is poor education and health status among the disempowered class, both as a cause and as a consequence of the characteristics listed above. The endeavour needs to focus around finding tools and interventions that address these disaggregated strands of poverty. This is also a useful analytical tool because capacity development to address poverty per se, is likely to be interpreted differently in differing contexts and is complicated further by the multiplicity of definitions and academic dialogue that surround the poverty-word. In so doing, it pushes outwards the production, income and consumption envelopes of this class, thereby creating capacities for dealing with poverty.