MISEREOR sees its commitment to participation by the poor and disadvantaged as a political extension of the original slogan of "helping people help themselves". This means empowering the poor to harness their own development potentials, and feed those potentials into the political development processes of their communities and societies. The poor will thus be enabled to become the subjects, the agents of their own development process, of their own history. In this sense, participation is itself both a goal of development-policy action, and a principle and instrument for poverty reduction and democratisation.