Nobody said putting a book together was easy. Perhaps what made this project a bit more difficult was that different topics were handled by different people, resulting in different writing styles, research techniques, approaches, and ways of viewing things. To paraphrase the old saying, we got different strokes by different folks. But when we started this project, we knew that we were all bound by a common thread—and a common threat. Since we were all part of a network of civil-society organizations, the common thread that bound us was the impetus to contribute to the development debate and to influence government's policy directions. But perhaps the more compelling push for us to get together at this time is the common threat facing us all today -- poverty, which is once more on the rise.