This paper provides a rationale for defining extreme poverty as a combination of income poverty, human development poverty and social exclusion. It briefly discusses the implication of treating this combination as union or intersection of the three sets of people, suffering from these three types of poverty. It also brings out the significance of looking at extreme poverty in a human rights perspective, and what is its value addition to programmes of poverty eradication in different countries. Besides, it elaborates on the formulation of such programmes, in terms of human rights obligation through national actions, extending them to programmes of international actions. By spelling out the characteristics of these actions that make them conform to a human rights approach, it discusses some of the anti-poverty programmes that have been used in different countries like the United States, European Union, Africa and Asia and how they differ from a rights-based approach that has been developed in this paper.