'From Many Lands' gives us an opportunity to meet the invisible people, see their invisible world, and hear their voices as they talk among themselves and talk to us. What this will mean to us, that is up to us to decide.
Muhammad Yunus
Founder and Managing Director; Grameen Bank

Voices of the Poor is a multicountry research initiative to understand poverty from the standpoint of the poor. The Voices of the Poor project was undertaken to inform the World Bank's activities and the World Development Report 2000/2001.

There are three books from this project:...

This book brings together the latest thinking about poverty dynamics from diverse analytic traditions. While covering a vast body of conceptual and empirical knowledge about economic and social mobility, it takes the reader on compelling journeys of multigenerational accounts of three villages in Kanartaka, India, twelve years in the life of a street child in Burkina Faso, and much more. Leading development practitioners and scholars from the fields of anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology critically examine the literature from their disciplines and contribute new...

"There is no peace with hunger. Only promises and promises and no fulfillment. If there is no job, there is no peace. If there is nothing to cook in the pot, there is no peace." - Oscar, a 57-year-old man, El Gorrion, Colombia "They want to construct their houses near the road, and they cannot do that if they do not have peace with their enemies. So peace and the road have developed a symbiotic relation. One cannot live without the other. . . ." - A community leader from a conflict-affected community on the island of Mindanao, Philippines Most conflict studies focus on the national level, but...

On Norms and Agency explores some of the power dynamics of gender relations within the household and communities in different contexts. These processes are analyzed from the perspectives of groups of men and women and boys and girls who participated in focus groups in 97 communities around the world. From gender differences and inequalities to intra-household decision making, more than 4,000 women and men in 500-plus single-sex focus groups reflected on how social norms that define what it means to be and act as a woman or a man affect their life outcomes and their access to opportunities....