Porosity fluctuations can have a strong impact on the plastic behaviour of ductile materials. The phenomenon can be studied and predicted via computational homogenization techniques, which, however, can be highly computationally demanding especially when large representative volume elements are needed. In this work, we propose a more efficient approach to model the plastic deformation that controls the strength of ductile materials containing pores. The key idea is to treat the material as a network rather than as a continuum. In fact, experimental and numerical studies show that plastic deformation in porous metals occurs via the formation of narrow shear bands that connect the pores [1]. This suggests modelling the plastic deformation as a time-evolving network where the nodes represent the pores and the links represent the shear bands. Network approaches have been successfully applied to study the irreversible deformation of granular materials in the past 10-15 years. This work demonstrates that their application can also be extended to porous ductile solids [2]. Indeed, using 2D synthetic microstructures, we show that the evolution of the basic metrics of the so-called shear band network (SBN) can explain the evolution of the material response at the macroscale for several loading types. We also demonstrate that the concept of SBN allows constructing efficient, parameter-free indicators of the material strength that are solely based on the pore size and spatial distribution. [1] Becker R., The effect of porosity distribution on ductile failure, Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids, Vol. 35 (5), pp. 577-599, 1987. [2] Andriollo T., Kouznetsova V., Alessandretti L., Network approach for the analysis of the irreversible deformation of solids with soft heterogeneities, Physical Review Materials, Vol. 6 (11), 2022.