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jority of the population in many countries. The term‘the poor’ is a convenience, of course, for this multitudeis far from a monolithic constituency despitesharing hunger, ill health, inadequate housing andother pathologies of poverty. They live in remote ruralvillages and in urban shantytowns. They work assubsistence farmers, agricultural labourers, domesticworkers, street vendors, and trash recyclers. Theyare members of underrepresented ethnic minorities— often internal or external migrants seeking improvedopportunities in a new area where they lackclear legal status. They have been displaced by warand civil unrest, and they are indigenous people whohave been left out and left behind by the dominantsociety. A lopsided number of the poor are women,who usually have home and family responsibilitieson top of any work they have found outside thehome. It is useful to have a segmented census ofthe poor as a starting point for Legal Empowermentof the Poor work in any country, to know who theyare, where they are located, and to what extent theirinterests are aligned.Beneficiaries of legal empowerment need to haveas big a hand as possible in initiating and designingthe relevant policies. Even though they lackphysical or financial resources, and organisationalresources and social capital in many locales, thepoor always have a passive capacity to derail legalreforms aimed at them. If the poor are afraid of oraverse to playing their designated role in implementation,the best intended policy would cometo nothing. It is critical that their views be airedand taken into account by policymakers to makesure the proposed course of action fits what poorstakeholders are prepared to do.Because poor stakeholders are diverse, legal empowermentplatforms may have surprisingly unevenimpact if officials are inattentive. An illustrationcomes from South Africa. Residents of extra-legalsettlements in South Africa can be given individualdeeds to their homes. Yet, for some inhabitants theresult is a decrease in security of tenure. Ownershipis registered in the name of only one memberof each household, to the disadvantage of womenand members of the extended family. The newproperty owners also become liable for paying localtaxes and service charges, forcing some to sell becausethey cannot afford to pay. A few people who,by statute, come to own dwellings, cannot not livein them because informal street committees decideother people should take possession of the properties(Cousins et al. 2005). Thus an apparently equitablepolicy to expand asset-holding rights endsup having an unequal impact on poverty, becauseeven within these very poor residential areas, materialgoods and power are not distributed equally.Policymakers might have minimised this outcomeby differentiating among beneficiaries and payinggreater attention to existing social practices thathave widespread legitimacy (see the later discussionof informal institutions).Poor women present a particular challenge forLegal Empowerment of the Poor because insome cases their advantage can be to the disadvantageof the male half of the poor population. In EastAfrica, for instance, women tend to enjoy ‘use rights’to land (see further discussion of the spectrum ofland rights, below) as wives and mothers, but lacktransfer rights due to customs that reserve these formen. Women therefore are without secure claim to anatural resource they use for daily supplies of fuel,water and food. Legal insecurity inhibits economicprogress because women cannot make decisionson expanding or developing land (UNEP 2004:99).Their fathers, husbands and sons are likely to balkat efforts to implement expanded women’s rightsin this important economic realm, because theywould compromise men’s rights to the same assets.Women’s community based organisations may be theanswer. These have proven somewhat effective inpreserving women’s land access in Mexico, though292