Australian Development Gateway

The Australian Development Gateway (ADG) strives to support members of the development community in their efforts to reduce poverty and enhance sustainable development in the Asia Pacific region. The site has been created with participation from members of government, private, academia and non-government organisations. User feedback mechanisms have been incorporated to guide future directions of the site. The site is optimised for low bandwidth access to enable the widest participation throughout the Asia Pacific region.

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ADG TOOLBOX

ICT project management

Steps: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |

Step 4: Identify types of intervention

What types of interventions are most likely to be effective in addressing the causes of poverty? Try to distinguish between direct, indirect and supporting interventions.

A direct intervention refers to addressing a prominent underlying cause of poverty. For example, providing access to other income generating opportunities in the above case where hunger is caused by lack of access to a sustainable livelihood.

Indirect interventions seek to establish an environment or set up an intermediary to make the directly targeted interventions more effective. Examples of indirect interventions include:

  • financing public health facilities
  • establishing a sound policy and regulatory framework for credit facilities, or
  • undertaking agricultural research appropriate for small farmers

Supporting interventions may not provide any direct linkages with the target population but may, nevertheless, benefit the poor by helping them to reduce their poverty.

Policy reform of how government services are delivered by making the service delivered more accountable and transparent is an example of a supporting intervention. Systems which promote more effective service delivery help the poor gain better access to basic education or health care.

Identifying the likely causes of the particular type of poverty under scrutiny is essential to work out the best point of intervention.

A focus on possible causes helps to ensure that the project is not merely alleviating the symptoms of poverty. For example, looking for the causes of hunger may require going beyond the obvious such as poor nutrition to look for more fundamental causes such as a lack of access to productive land or other critical aspects.

This process of assigning order of importance to the likely causes may be difficult but it holds the promise of achieving a more permanent impact.

 

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