Building communities' capacity for decisionmaking on resource use is empowering them to take charge of their own development. The PRSP process will build on the valuable experience of countries piloting the CDF approach. Strategies are comprehensive, reflecting the multidimensional nature of poverty and the need to integrate institutional, structural, and sectoral interventions into a consistent macroeconomic framework. Strategies adopt a long-term perspective. Strategies are developed and implemented in partnership, with the PRSP becoming the basis for donor support.
Strategies aim to achieve results on the ground.
In many developing countries, the poor struggle at the margin of the formal economy. They lack political influence, education, health care, adequate shelter, personal safety, regular income, and enough to eat. Worldwide, the number and proportion of people living in extreme poverty declined slightly through the mid-1990s. Most of the decline was in East Asia, notably in China. But progress slowed temporarily in some Asian countries in the late 1990s, and ground to a halt or reversed in others.