This book arises from rural livelihoods research conducted in eastern and southern Africa in the period 2000 to 2003. The central theme of the book is the connection that needs to be made between patterns of rural livelihoods as they actually occur and the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) that are the centrepiece of government-donor efforts to reduce the incidence of absolute poverty in low income countries. It might be thought that this connection is obvious and hardly requires further elaboration, particularly given the efforts that are made to inform PRSPs by consultative exercises with civil society organisations and participatory poverty assessments. However, such a presumption would be seriously wide of the mark. The reality is that despite their stated intentions to be innovative and cross-cutting documents, most PRSPs end up looking rather like sectoral expenditure plans, even a bit like those monolithic national development plans that were so popular three or more decades ago. Meanwhile, livelihoods are not like that at all; they are multiple, diverse, adaptive, flexible and crosssectoral. Evidence provided in the chapters of this book suggests a serious mismatch between macro level poverty reduction strategies and the realities of micro level livelihoods. This chapter provides an overview of the conceptual framework that informs the approach of many of the later chapters in the book, as well as a synthesis of the themes that bind the chapters together into a mosaic that seeks to shed light upon, and to take forward discussion about, the mismatch alluded to above. The starting point is the livelihoods approach to poverty reduction that provides a powerful framework within which micro-level experiences of poverty and vulnerability can be connected to the policy contexts that either block or facilitate people’s own efforts to escape from poverty. It is the livelihoods framework that permits apparently disparate dimensions and entry points into poverty reduction debates to be brought together in a reasonably unified way.