The problem of poverty and how to reduce it remains the most pressing dilemma in the international development debate. More specifically, two questions are at the heart of much of academic research and public policy for development, namely: what is it that makes Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) the poorest region in the world and what can be done to deliver the sustainable and broad-based economic growth required to address this? This paper seeks to provide an introduction to current debates on these two interrelated questions. We do not pretend to provide a comprehensive overview of a vast and ever changing body of academic literature and government policy. Rather, the paper has two main objectives. Firstly, we highlight the principal drivers and maintainers of poverty in SSA as we see them (building on a holistic approach to defining poverty) and, secondly, we critically discuss selected policies for economic development and poverty reduction. In addition, while there are many commonalities between countries in the region, there is also a great deal of diversity that a regional focus overlooks. Indeed, one of the main failings of development policies advocated by aid agencies has been an overly prescriptive, one-size-fits-all mentality that does not take country-specific constraints into account. We seek to chart a course between these extremes by dividing the drivers and maintainers of poverty into two broad categories: socio-economic factors (such as risk and vulnerability and low capabilities) and political economy factors (such as non-developmental politics, corruption and the ‘resource curse’). This approach aims to identify issues that can (at least partially) be addressed through public policy while also situating them in their broad political and institutional context. In particular, in many states in SSA, informal institutions (‘rules of the game’) are equally if not more important than formal ones. Such states often have a politics dominated by informal, patrimo