How does a country cut poverty substantially over three decades while growing slowly, governing weakly, and barely touching its land reforms? Nepal did it. In a piece I co-wrote with Siddharth Poddar on Stonebench’s Perspectives blog, we argue the answer isn’t the usual suspects — not growth, not remittances — but the cumulative pull of many small-scale interventions: rural roads, electrification, schools, irrigation, community projects. Strengthening livelihoods where people already lived, rather than pulling them into urban factories.