Poverty alleviation has become a dominant strategy of much of the aid of international donors to countries in sub-Saharan Africa Such strategies are seen I as the principal weapon of attacking the endemic poverty which plagues the lives of many of the region's people. However many of these donors are using their support for poverty alleviation as a means of "democratising" supposedly undemocratic states and of promoting a more widespread and genuine participation of the region's poor!n development initiatives and activities. This article explores the experiences to date of poverty alleviation strategies in several sub-Saharan countries which have been built on participatory principles and which seek to get to the root cause of people's poverty. The article reviews the concept of participation in both an economic and a political sense and draws up a balance sheet of the current state of play.
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