LocationsPlacing Poverty at the Heart of the Conversation
April 7, 2025
Event Details
April 10, 2025
11:00 AM (Nueva York)
Online
Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) made significant progress in reducing poverty until the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, when this trend began to slow down. This progress was the result of economic growth, effective social policies, and the use of innovative instruments, such as conditional cash transfers. However, the slowdown in economic growth, together with a series of crises, such as migration, violence, governance problems in several countries, and, notoriously, the COVID-19 pandemic, halted this trend and displaced the centrality of poverty from the regional public debate.
Today, the region faces new challenges that could intensify this slowdown and even reverse some achievements, including limited fiscal space and new barriers to trade, which may affect regional economic growth. If LAC aspires to return to the path of poverty reduction, it will be necessary to increase the efficiency of public spending above all. This can be achieved through new tools that complement those used successfully in the past.
The new multidimensional poverty measures are particularly useful for this purpose. However, a fundamental step in making these new policies possible—and the changes needed to get back on the path of poverty reduction—is to put poverty back at the center of public debate in the region.
This dialogue seeks to foster this discussion by analyzing both the challenges facing this agenda in LAC and the measurement initiatives that open the door to new public policy tools aimed at reducing poverty.
