level—along the lines of the Brazilian _Bolsa Escola_ for primary education. Improved quality of and access to education can reduce the likelihood of becoming poor, as more education is a key factor in obtaining a higher income in both the farm and nonfarm sectors. Furthermore, education is associated with fertility: the more education a woman attains, the lower her fertility rate and, therefore, the lower the dependency ratio, and the lower the likelihood of falling into poverty. Special efforts should be made to increase the level of human capital, including: (i) ensuring access to high quality health care including reproductive health; and (ii) ensuring access to high quality education and primary and secondary education adapted to the realities in rural areas; including technical or vocational training components at the end of primary school.

_Second,_ create jobs. Many households are poor because they are trapped on lowproductivity land or are in low-paying, low-productivity jobs in the informal sector or are unemployed. Workers need more productive jobs and tighter labor markets to raise their income above the poverty level. It should be recognized that since very few people work in the formal labor market, social policies tied to formal employment or unemployment will have only a very limited reach among the poor. Special efforts should be made to assist in generating rural employment. Many high productivity, labor intensive jobs can be created in the regional economies by improving the provision of public goods and the environment for collective action in irrigated agriculture, among other things.

_Third,_ facilitate migration to higher opportunity areas, i.e., grouped or urban areas. In addition to education, other mechanisms should be explored to facilitate the ongoing migration out of dispersed areas. These could range from efforts to improve social linkages or capital between households in dispersed areas to a program to ensure titling of land for indigent farmers on dispersed lands. In the absence of titles a farmer on dispersed land has little chance to benefit from the land improvements undertaken were he to choose to move to higher opportunity areas.

_Fourth,_ target carefully. Poverty interventions need to target the poor population as effectively as possible. In view of the trend of population movement out of dispersed areas, the much lower prospects for the development of human capital in these areas, and the very high cost of providing public goods _,_ the government should, to the extent possible, invest in the people, not in the area. The government needs to develop a poverty monitoring system to track living conditions and provide data for (1) evaluating the impact of interventions, and (2) improving the targeting of interventions. The government should also seek to develop a key set of indicators for monitoring actions to reduce poverty. This may require including rural areas in the annual household survey or introducing an annual rural household survey.

_Fifth,_ increase sectoral integration. For the poverty reduction strategy to be effective, a high level of sectoral integration is needed at all levels of government. It is of utmost importance that the Secretariat of Economy work closely with the country’s other secretariats so that all changes in poverty indicators, etc. are reflected in social programs. Finally, rural development is a small part of the Ministry of Agriculture. In order to serve 48