This proposal aims to institute national, democratic planning through which governments organise long-term, coordinated plans to eradicate poverty beyond growth, utilizing post-market redistribution, in-market inclusions, and pre-market social investment strategies. In the 2012 Guiding Principles on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, governments pledged to adopt poverty reduction strategies based on human rights, involving people in poverty in their design and implementation, and setting targets to be reached within specific time frames. This proposal, otherwise discussed at length in the report the Special Rapporteur presented at the 62nd session of the Human Rights Council, calls for adopting National Anti-Poverty Strategies that explicitly organize policy interventions across three levers: (1) post-market compensation through progressive taxation and universal public services, combined with (2) in-market inclusion strategies such as labour market reforms that guarantee living wages and reduce precarity, and (3) sustained pre-market social investment in early childhood, education, housing, and nutrition to break the vicious cycles that perpetuate poverty across generations.
NAPS should begin by comprehensively assessing the state of poverty, grounded in multidimensional measures that capture deprivations across income, living standards, health, education, and social participation, while ensuring that the “missing poor” – including undocumented migrants, homeless persons, and people living in institutions – are not excluded from analysis. Indeed, such diagnostics should remain attentive to the hidden and relational dimensions of poverty, including institutional and social maltreatment, as well as experiences of disempowerment and suffering, which are often overlooked in conventional measures of poverty. Given the trans-sectoral nature of poverty, NAPS should call for establishing high-level coordination mechanisms across ministries and levels of government, that can align post-market compensation with in-market inclusions and pre-market social investment, involving the necessary departments in planning and implementation. NAPS should also aim to improve accountability by setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) targets that are binding and allow progress to be assessed by opposition political parties, non-governmental organisations and unions, and the media. Finally, the design of NAPS should favour the meaningful participation of people living in poverty to shape design decisions, while embedding long-term, preventive approaches that address the structural and intergenerational drivers of poverty. In this way, national anti-poverty strategies can move beyond fragmented, reactive, and purely programmatic interventions to serve as coherent, rights-based frameworks through which States address the structural production of poverty and ensure its sustained eradication over time.
