For more than two decades, governments and development agencies around the world have focused on reducing poverty. This book presents the Community-Based Monitoring System (CBMS) which recognizes that the poor must be involved in planning public programmes that affect their well-being. It further recognizes that, to be effective, development programmes must be targeted and informed by relevant, current and accurate disaggregated data. To accomplish this, CBMS brings together communities and local authorities to gather and monitor locally obtained, verifiable information about actual living conditions, and to use this information for planning and policy-making. Drawing from CBMS experience in Africa and Asia, the authors present recommendations for policymakers, donor agencies, and researchers. They also present guidelines for developing and implementing poverty monitoring systems in other regions of the world. This book is about how CBMS has been developed and implemented in various corners of the globe and how the evidence it yields has and can be used to reduce poverty. The books shows how a local monitoring system can be designed and implemented to respond to local needs and capabilities in different developing countries, and how analysis of data generated from CBMS can be used by local and national policymakers, to help reduce poverty.