Once a household has escaped poverty it is far from guaranteed that its members will
continue
to live at a level above the poverty line. Evidence from nine three
-
wave panel datasets (surveys
which returned to interview the same household at three points in time) shows that at least 15
%
of households
that
escape poverty return to it in th
e future. In one case this proportion is 60
%
.
Even if a household escapes poverty and remains out of it, this does not mean that its living
standards
continue
to improve. Education, and particularly having the second four years of
primary education or more
, emerges as extremely important to sustain poverty escapes, as
does land. The paper discusses a range of policies, including life
-
cycle investments in
education, policies to secure access to land by the poorest people and local economic
development polici
es all which can promote resilient poverty escapes and improve the quality of
those escapes.