Monitoring progress towards gender-equitable poverty alleviation

Abstract

This article contributes towards unpacking the relationships between gender, poverty and inequality at several interrelated levels. It explores the concept of poverty as a useful starting point not only for understanding how gender fits into it, but also for understanding why gender is not reducible to poverty. It provides a brief history of how poverty came to be analysed from a gender perspective, and how such a perspective advances our understanding of poverty and inequality. The article follows this with a critical analysis of important gendered and non-gendered approaches developed to measure poverty, and outlines their contributions to advancing the art of monitoring and evaluating gendered poverty. Using research conducted predominantly in South Asia, it demonstrates how the richness of academic scholarship and discourses on gender and poverty contrast sharply not only with the narrow range of strategies employed for poverty alleviation, but also the limited array of methods and tools designed to monitor and analyse poverty from a gender perspective.