Families overwhelmingly suggest measures which will increase the productivity of available land and human resources. Almost half of the recommendations are related to infrastructure and a very high share also demanded agricultural and non-agricultural training courses.

This paper, based on case studies conducted in May 1994 in seven rural communities, is organized as follows: Section 2 provides a short background on rural life in Ecuador's three diverse regions. In Section 3, we present the research objectives, the design, and methodology of the qualitative assessment. Section 4 contains community descriptions. Location and population,<sup>the</sup> employment pattern, basic service access or community organization are some of the characteristics we look at. Sections 5 to 7 then portrait the results of the assessment:<sup>Section 5 describes the</sup> perceptions of households regarding the underlying causes of their poverty;<sup>Section 6 focuses on the</sup> specific strategies that these households employ in order to survive and Section<sup>7 presents the</sup> household members' recommendations for actions that could be undertaken<sup>to alleviate rural</sup> poverty. We conclude with a short summary.

After the fieldwork of the Rural Qualitative Assessment had been undertaken,<sup>UNICEF</sup> Ecuador commissioned a second round of qualitative assessments in six Sierra communities<sup>to</sup> complement the analysis and examine whether the findings of the initial community studies were confirmed. We summarize the results of these additional community assessments,<sup>which confirm</sup> the conclusions of the Rural Qualitative Assessment, in an Addendum to this paper.

# 2. Living Conditions in Rural Ecuador

This section discusses two aspects of living conditions in rural Ecuador: rural heterogeneity and access to productive resources.

## _2.1. Rural Heterogeneity_

Ecuador is indeed a country of contrasts; its heterogeneity is expressed in ecological, socioeconomic, and cultural terms not only between and within disparate areas<sup>of the country, but</sup> even within a given community.

Inter-regional heterogeneity. Ecuador's regional division in the Costa (coastal lowlands), Sierra (highlands) and the Oriente (upper Amazon basin) manifest themselves in three distinct<sup>rural</sup> structures. Since the colonial period, the predominant feature in the _Sierra_ has been the bifurcated hacienda-minifundia system. Before agrarian reform in the early 1960s, the system was based on the monopoly of land and the imposition of obligatory labor services, but it subsequently experienced substantial change that revolved around the evolution of modem<sup>dairy farms and</sup> independent peasant communities. In the past decade, the nontraditional agricultural<sup>export</sup> (NTAE) sector has developed producing products such as cut flowers which provide part of the growing off-farm rural employment in the region. Other off-farm employment possibilities<sup>in the</sup> rural Sierra are textile, shoe or hat production which take place with simple machinery<sup>within the</sup> household boundary.

Development in the _Costa_ began in the mid-19th century, and was based on export-oriented plantation agriculture, where wage labor systems evolved alongside commercially<sup>oriented small-</sup> 2