A most unsettling observation is that rural poverty is on the increase, despite decades of rural development. The blame is currently being placed on modes of designing and implementing development programmes, which are seen to have failed to take the basic needs of the poor into account. Further blame is placed on historical factors together with the social structures that have developed from them. The paper examines a selection of current ideas about rural poverty and their implications for the practice and teaching of fieldwork in social development, and points out the issues involved, giving suggestions on how they might be dealt with.
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