One thing that is striking when one spends any amount of time with men,
women and children who are living day to day in poverty is their
resourcefulness. Where many of us from much more privileged
backgrounds would be defeated by such hardship, and find it difficult to see
ways of living in these conditions, those who do display remarkable
resilience and innovation, and through hard work, survive. This is not
romanticism or an attempt to idealise poverty and the poor - it is an observable fact. As the currently popular statistics tell us, millions of people
around the world live on less than one dollar-a-day and are apparently
without obvious means of meeting their daily needs of food and shelter.
While many succumb, especially children, most survive. The puzzle for
those involved in research and practice at the frontline of development has
been to understand how they do this.