Much of the work on poverty reduction is in the hands of central governments often operating at the national level. It consists generally of a series of macro-economic and social measures which seek to impact across a wide spectrum of regions and cities, often targeting specific social groups who may be found in different regional contexts (UNDP, 2000). The present series of studies aims to document and understand mechanisms used at the municipal or city level to reduce poverty. In many instances, national governments are too far removed from the realities of city populations to perceive and understand the complexities...

Founded in 1536 in the fertile valley of the Cauca river in Western Colombia by the Spanish conquistadors, Cali was, until the twentieth century, a secondary provincial town in the region of Cauca, which had been dominated by Popayán, a city founded also in the early sixteenth century and located 140 kilometres south of Cali. Extensive agriculture has helped underpin the economy of the Cauca valley, where ownership of land has traditionally been highly concentrated in a few hands. This in part explains why, despite the wealth and productivity of the soil surrounding it, Cali would not flourish until well...

Despite Colombia’s sustained rates of economic growth until the mid-1990s, poverty and an unequal distribution of income have been two significant features in its development in the past few decades. Another significant element in this period has been a shift in the incidence of poverty from rural to urban areas, largely a result of the very rapid and disproportionate growth in city populations compared to rural areas.

Although there is no direct correlation between absolute poverty and an unequal distribution of income,⁴ a brief look at the issue of income distribution provides a useful background to our understanding of anti-poverty...

In many respects Cali is unique in Colombia in having a comparatively large non-governmental sector which has been active in social welfare activities since the 1960s. That it should have played an active and often crucial role in improving living conditions among the city’s poorer groups, often complementing the role of a local state stretched to its limits while setting an example for others to follow in Colombia and elsewhere, is a result of Cali’s social structure and recent history.

It is surprising to think that less than a decade ago Colombia represented a political and juridical environment where, officially,...

Private foundations have often worked hand in hand with local government. It was shown earlier how, in the face of the incapacity or unwillingness of the local government to act, the Catholic Church and the private sector started to actively intervene in seeking to alleviate poverty. Official intervention on a large scale had to wait until the 1970s, when the municipality deployed its resources for infrastructure programmes in Aguablanca, the most rapidly growing part of the city and what would become by far the largest concentration of low-income inhabitants. In all this, it relied on support from the private sector,...

In many ways, Cali is like any other large Colombian or Latin American city today. What a visitor sees is the result of a period of very high rates of population growth in recent decades, the difficulties the local state has in providing the necessary infrastructure and the institutional responses to accommodate a large influx of newcomers, and the stark contrast between the elegant and leafy neighbourhoods on the Cali river and Aguablanca’s barren landscape by the Cauca river. In the 1980s and 1990s, Cali had higher levels of income inequality than most other large Colombian cities.

And yet, Cali’s...