This Rural Poverty Reduction Strategy (GN-1995-5) proposes a menu of strategic approaches and options for reducing rural poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean, combining the Bank's own experiences and those of other organizations in designing options and instruments for use in programs carried out with the support of the Bank. The Strategy is new in that 1) It focuses on the problem of rural poverty from a broader perspective, including other sectors in addition to agriculture, while recognizing the heterogeneity of rural poverty and promoting policies and instruments that in the medium term will decrease rural poverty in the region. 2) Its goal is to design and implement rural development programs that will produce results over the medium haul, based on national rural poverty reduction strategies, financing successive steps and promoting institutional strengthening as the first stage of the process. 3) It reinforces the importance of designing rural development programs that include decentralization of activities and active participation by beneficiaries. 4) It aims to establish closer coordination with other development, technical cooperation and lending agencies, as well as national, subregional and municipal development organizations, and to coordinate the various internal activities of the Bank related to rural development, ensuring closer integration of effort. 5) It stresses the need to focus greater attention on the execution and monitoring of operations. 6) It calls to continue to upgrade the Bank's technical capacity.
