10 Pro-poor capacity-building in India’s women’s health sector Arabinda Ghosh Introduction Reducing poverty is the fundamental objective of economic develop- ment. In 2001, more than 1 billion people in the developing world lived in poverty. Poverty has many faces, changing from place to place and across time, and has been described in many ways. The World Health Organization (WHO) stated in 1999 that poverty must be addressed in all its dimensions, not income alone, because the resulting inequalities in health outcomes are stark. For example, the under-five mortality rate is five times higher for people who are living in absolute poverty than for those in higher income groups. Further, those living in absolute poverty are two-and-a-half times more likely to die between the ages of 15 and 59, and in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where almost 50 per cent of the population live in absolute poverty, the lifetime risk of dying in pregnancy is 1 in 12, compared with 1 in 4,000 in Europe. 1 Among the poor, women are more vulnerable in terms of access to resources. The present scenario of women in most of the developing countries corroborates the collective household model, 2 which helps Partnerships for women’s health: Striving for best practice within the UN Global Compact, Timmermann and Kruesmann (eds), United Nations University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-92-808-1185-8