Alleviating Poverty

Abstract

Katherine Pennington's painting You're My Tenth Customer depicts a woman entrepreneur at work. Facilitating entrepreneurship among women through small loan programs is the focus of many of the poverty alleviation efforts discussed here by Irene Tinker. Such programs have worked in developing countries, and the author discusses what American policymakers might learn from them. The artist lives and works in Portland, Oregon, focusing on paintings in acrylic depicting ethnic themes, usually involving children. She was a customer of the hair salon shown in the image for many years. Poverty issues and the growing income gap in the U.S. are once again on the nation's agenda. Similar trends in developing countries caused a shift in development policies from industrial and infrastructure projects to those designed to alleviate poverty. Increasingly such programs focused on women and their need for income. Microcredit programs that offered loans and training have proved to be one of the most successful interventions. In the last decade, similar microenterprise programs have been introduced in the U.S. Comparisons between the U.S.