Chapter 3 of Agenda 21 provides the framework for a comprehensive attack on poverty. It recognizes poverty as a complex multidimensional problem, the resolution of which requires a specific anti-poverty strategy—itself a basic condition for ensuring sustainable development. It urges, inter alia, action to:

• Empower community and local groups;

• Provide basic education and primary and maternal health care; and

• Advance the status of women through their full participation in decision making. It calls on governments and the United Nations system to make poverty alleviation a priority task.

More than 1 billion people, or about one fifth of the world’s population, live under conditions of extreme poverty, and the eradication of poverty has long been on the international agenda. The task, however, is not made easier by the fact that population growth is fastest among the poorest and in the poorest countries.

A more ambitious and aggressive pursuit of the eradication of poverty has become even more necessary with the realization, in recent years, that poverty is among the most significant contributing factors to environmental degradation.

UNFPA already supports a variety of projects and programmes with a direct bearing on poverty. These include maternal and child health and family planing programmes, which are typically targeted at rural inhabitants, the urban poor, women and youth because these groups are disproportionately affected by poverty. In research, the Fund supports a number of programmes and initiatives aimed at improving understanding of the relationship between poverty, population pressure and environmental degradation.