Uganda has been able to achieve an impressive pro-poor change in spending patterns in recent years and its home-grown Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) has been presented as the model for the post-structural adjustment Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) required by the international community.  This paper aims to understand the political factors which explain this impressive achievement, but which also might threaten its sustainability and make the replication of the Ugandan model problematic. We have identified the coming together of three different ‘projects for poverty reduction’ which have reinforced one another and which have been able to use the PEAP as a vehicle to drive the process forward continuously.