The role of the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN) is to increase awareness of chronic poverty, ensuring that chronically poor people are not forgotten by policy makers, and to use evidence to improve the effectiveness of policies and programmes at reducing chronic poverty.

CPAN research focuses on six main themes (Financial Inclusion, Private Sector, Education, Energy, and Employment) and has so far resulted in a portfolio of sector and thematic policy guides. With this set of resources, CPAN aims to help policymakers and programme designers using evidence about chronic poverty and poverty dynamics in designing policies and programmes to

1.    Contribute to addressing the causes of chronic poverty

2.    Assist the poorest households to escape poverty

3.    Prevent impoverishment.

With partners in 16 countries, CPAN emerged from the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC), which worked to assess and explain the extent and nature of chronic poverty in developing countries. There is now an urgent need to make these findings better known among policy makers, and to develop practical guidance, and new policies and programmes to facilitate escapes from poverty, prevent descents into it and address the causes of chronic poverty.

The CPRC demonstrated that there is considerable overlap between people who live in chronic poverty and those who are severely poor. It is on these two groups of poorest people which CPAN focuses its work.