Mauritius will soon launch an Observatory for Poverty in order to monitor the effectiveness of poverty alleviation policies and actions throughout the island and to produce timely information for policy makers and other stakeholders. Finance and Economic Empowerment Minister Ramakrishna Sithanen, said it was crucial to build capacity in the areas of measuring poverty, monitoring and assessment to support the comprehensive policy to eradicate absolute poverty in the Indian Ocean island. Sithanen stressed that the qualitative methodology was not meant to replace or duplicate traditional techniques of measuring poverty but rather to complement them. The minister recalled that a special item of around 395 million rupees (about US $ 14.1 million) has been created for poverty alleviation in the 2008/09 budget that will focus on 229 pockets of absolute poverty in the country.
