How can ‘friends of the poor’ in government or other agencies design and manage their anti-poverty programmes to encourage mobilisation? We explore the options, point out the advantages and disadvantages of the more direct methods, and make a case for the indirect or parametric approach: creating an enabling institutional environment, that encourages poor people, social activists and grassroots political entrepreneurs to invest in pro-poor mobilisation. We then present a language for understanding the various dimensions of this enabling institutional environment, and use it to examine two contrasting, successful cases: rural water supply in Nepal, and the Employment Guarantee Scheme in Maharashtra, India.
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