Responding to the Challenges of Poverty Eradication : Study of the EU-UNIDO Partnership

Abstract: Poverty is a severe problem which deserves global attention. Despite the efforts of the international society and the commitments enshrined in the Millennium Declaration around two billion people are poor in today’s world. The key lies in the collaboration and building of partnerships in order to better tackle this worldwide problem. This study focuses particularly on the EU-UNIDO partnership and is aimed at evaluating its work towards eradicating poverty. For this purpose, fact sheets and charts from various secondary sources have been analysed. Moreover, the author has carried out a qualitative analysis of two EU-UNIDO projects according to a particular evaluation scheme. The study is of importance since the suggestions as to improvement of the EU-UNIDO partnership arising from it can help tackle the global poverty problem more effectively.There is a widespread view that most of the world’s extremely poor live in the Low Income countries (LICs) of Africa. However, a recent study suggests that bulk of the world’s poor actually live in Middle Income Countries (MICs), mostly in Asia. For the purpose of the analysis the following questions are addressed. Firstly, the study seeks to find out what instruments the EU-UNIDO partnership uses to tackle the problem of poverty and whether they are successful. Secondly, it investigates if and to what extent the EU-UNIDO partnership takes into account the change in the global distribution of the poor. The results indicate that in order to fight poverty the EU-UNIDO projects mostly seek to boost economic growth and develop trade capacity. However, the project area of action is not always pro-poor. Moreover, geographical distribution of the EU-UNIDO projects does not run in accordance with the global poverty distribution.