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Excerpted from the infoDev publication, Information and Communication Technologies, Poverty and Development: Learning from Experience.

Our understanding of the complexity of poverty's causes and characteristics, at both the individual and societal level, has led to increased attention to the problem of poverty traps. Poverty traps occur when a multiplicity of factors, each of which independently would lead to poverty, are compounded and feed upon each other, making poverty virtually inescapable. For example, a resource-poor, geographically isolated, small country with low per-capita income and low levels of education will often suffer as well from weak governmental institutions, poor infrastructure and very little access to foreign investment. Unable to generate new sources of economic growth, it is trapped in commodity-exporting sectors of the global economy, where prices are plummeting, global competition is increasing (particularly from those countries able to harness new technologies), and rich-country trade barriers and subsidies remain high. Not only are the root causes of the country's poverty virtually intractable, they are compounded by global factors over which the country has little control.

At the individual level, poverty traps are often just as intractable. A family with few physical or financial assets is dependent on markets and institutions that function poorly and on inadequate (or non-existent) public infrastructure. Their chances for advancement are limited by poor educational opportunities; persistent malnutrition, poor hygiene and sanitation, and the chronic and acute disease they engender; little or no access to capital; and, in many cases, discrimination.