Poverty reduction has two fundamental requirements: enabling the poor and marginal groups to participate in decisionmaking about their own development, and giving them access to capital, technology, credit, and land, especially in the case of the rural poor. Programs to deliver these basics must be designed with accuracy and sophistication within a frame- work of macroeconomic social policies whose main objective is poverty reduction. Social gains made through specific programs will be unsus- tainable in the absence of reform at the state level and the democratic participation of the people
