Introduction

Reducing poverty through appropriate strategies is one of the worldwide current major objectives. Helping those who are already poor to escape from poverty usually does this. Preventing the non-poor from falling into poverty – or the poor from getting poorer – when they are confronted with extreme difficulties could also be a supplementary solution. This second perspective is not frequently raised despite the increase of uncertainty and insecurity in a strongly changing world. All countries, in the developing and industrialised worlds, are facing regular internal and external shocks, which have an impact on their populations' standards of living.

Therefore individuals, households and social groups may see their level of living decrease and the risk of poverty traps appear, with long-term consequences on future generations. This raises the issue of vulnerability and makes the search for security a new objective for the present as well as for the future.

Let us define ‘vulnerability’ as the probability of having one's situation worsen when facing a dramatic event. Depending on various factors, this worsening may lead to poverty. Therefore decreasing the level of vulnerability could also be considered as part of poverty-reduction policies. It implies to design preventive ex-ante actions, besides the usual ex-post curative policies. In political terms, such an attitude may also be quite attractive and rewarding, since it corresponds to a reinforcement of the people's global security, which is now emerging as a new social claim.