To eradicate poverty, you must first understand it, says Deepa Willingham, founder of the nonprofit Promise of Assurance to Children Everywhere (PACE Universal), which supports the education, health, and social development of girls in the slums of Kolkata, India, and other areas around the world. Willingham, a member of the Rotary Club of Santa Ynez Valley, Calif., USA, spoke at the 2008 International Assembly about the 1.3 billion people – known as the world’s “bottom billion” – who somehow live on less than $1 a day, and about the 10 million children every year who die before their fifth birthday because of poverty-related malnutrition. (Willingham will also be a keynote speaker at the RI Convention in June.)

Although many successful efforts are underway to address these issues, the overall picture remains bleak. In 2005, economist Jeffrey Sachs, who headed the UN Millennium Project, took a comprehensive, authoritative look at the problems of poverty in the 21st century. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (Penguin Books, $17) remains a key book on the subject. Recounting his 25 years of work in places such as Bolivia, China, India, Russia, and several African nations, Sachs illuminates the complexities of extreme poverty.

“Ending global poverty by 2025 will require concerted actions by the rich countries as well as the poor,” he writes. “The poor countries must take ending poverty seriously, and will have to devote a greater share of their national resources to cutting poverty rather than to war, corruption, and political infighting. The rich countries will need to move beyond the platitudes of helping the poor, and follow through on their repeated promises to deliver more help.” His solution is based on the framework developed by the UN Millennium Project, which outlined ways to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals – including cutting the rate of extreme poverty in half – by 2015.

Since the effort began, billions of dollars have been spent to help reduce global poverty, but much of that money has gone into the pockets of thugs, corrupt politicians, militias, and unethical multinational corporations, argues Paul Collier in The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It (Oxford University Press, $15.95). Collier, a professor of economics at Oxford, posits four poverty traps: conflict created by war, rebellion, or coup; the inability to capitalize on abundant natural resources; being “landlocked with bad neighbors”; and shoddy governance. He contends that interventions by rich countries need to be “less sensitive” and more heavy-handed, even to the point of occupying poor countries to address conflicts that seem, inevitably, to result in cash disappearing into the wrong hands. He disagrees with Sachs on the role of foreign aid, which he says has been part of the problem in many countries.

“Teach a man to fish” is the approach advocated by Paul Polak in Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail (Berrett-Koehler, $27.95). When Polak – the founder of the nonprofit International Development Enterprises, which helps growers in developing countries move beyond subsistence agriculture – learned in 1981 that about 800 million people in the bottom billion were farmers, he started teaching them to use affordable irrigation tools and selling them modestly priced seeds and fertilizers, allowing them to grow high-value fruits and vegetables. One Nepalese man, he writes, went from barely growing enough to survive to earning a profit of $4,800 a year. Polak, who criticizes the Sachs approach as ineffective, says his method is working in the most impoverished parts of the world. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation apparently supports his idea: It issued his organization a grant of $13.4 million in 2007.

Margaret Trost’s On That Day Everybody Ate: One Woman’s Story of Hope and Possibility in Haiti (Koa Books, $15) is a powerful account that cuts through the theories on poverty to allow the reader to understand its devastating effects. Have a box of tissues handy: Trost’s descriptions of the depravations in St. Clare’s Parish in Port-au-Prince are heartbreaking. After her husband died at the age of 34, the author discovered a calling that brought meaning back into her life. For the past seven years, she has led the What If? Foundation to feed and educate nearly 1,000 children in Haiti, supported by the Rotary clubs of La Mesa and North Oakland-Emeryville, Calif., and Madison West Towne-Middleton, Wis., USA. Learn more at www.whatiffoundation.org.