Abstract:
Poverty alleviation is the ultimate goal of almost all development strategies which are implementing mainly in developing countries. This is because in a broader sense, development means the expansion of the range of choices and opportunities that people have. This is what we discuss broadly as alleviating poverty. In Sri Lanka, poverty alleviation has become one of the key targets of development policy arena during the past few decades. In addition to the overall development programs, there are several programs distinctively designed for combatting poverty.
The main objective of this study is to examine the trends of poverty incidence in Sri Lanka during the past few decades and challenges of poverty alleviation strategies. The evaluation is based mainly on the secondary data. Although analysis is descriptive in nature in addition to the descriptive statistical methods moderate analysis methods (correlation and regression) are used to examine the functional relationship between relevant variables such as poverty, economic growth, per capita income and income distribution. The major limitation of the study is that it focuses only on the income poverty although poverty is more than the inadequate income or expenditure.
As preliminary result shows poverty incidence has drastically declined during the recent past in all three sectors. Still, poverty burden is highest in the rural sector although poverty rate is highest in estate sector. Mean while, although, the decline of poverty incidence in the country is compatible with the economic growth took place during the past few years, it is not statistically significant. Poor targeting, lack of funding, poor implementation and supervision and the allocation inefficiency can be identified as the major challenges encountered by the poverty targeted programs.