

Past Event
On June 27 and 28, 2006, the Brookings Institution and the Ford Foundation hosted a workshop to discuss asset-based approaches to sustained poverty reduction in a globalized context.
The workshop provided 45 participants—practitioners from government and civil society, academics, and donors—the opportunity to explore similarities and differences between poverty reduction strategies framed by the social protection agenda to secure the poor against risks and shocks and those framed by an asset accumulation policy to create positive opportunities for sustainable asset accumulation and consolidation. During the workshop, which was led by Brookings scholar Caroline Moser, participants shared the results of recent policy-focused research, as well as cutting-edge practice, in order to strengthen the design and implementation of asset-based interventions in the context of a globalizing 21st century.
The workshop was organized in collaboration with the Ford Foundation, New York, and was linked to a research project on ‘Intergenerational asset accumulation and poverty reduction in Guayaquil, Ecuador.’ This is a longitudinal anthropological/sociological study that Brookings scholar Caroline Moser undertook between 1978 and 2004 in a poor urban community. The project traces how households have striven to accumulate assets such as housing, human capital, financial capital, social capital, and consumer durables and thereby not only ‘got out of poverty’ but also in some cases transferred assets to the next generation.
The assets framework that Moser developed as a result of this work gave participants a unified heuristic lens through which they analyzed their own research findings and practices. Because of this unified framework, the workshop provided a valuable opportunity for an exchange of practical experience between Ford Foundation grantees and others working operationally on asset-based approaches to poverty reduction. More specifically the workshop allowed participants to:
CONFERENCE PAPERS
POWERPOINTS
Ben S. Bernanke
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Danielle Resnick
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Elyse Painter, Emily Gustafsson-Wright, Ansumana Konneh
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