The Effectiveness of the Graduation Approach: What Does the Evidence Tell Us?

Stephen Kidd and Diloá Athias

ABSTRACT

No one should be against giving families living in poverty a few goats, chickens or cattle. Indeed, development projects have been doing these things for decades, with variable results. However, in recent years, major claims have been made about the impacts of livestock schemes known as graduation programmes. According to the World Bank’s Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP 2017), the graduation approach “holds significant purpose if implemented at scale to move people out of extreme poverty and into sustainable livelihoods”. Banerjee et al. (2015) argue that it “causes lasting progress for the very poor”, while in an article for The Guardian newspaper, Emma Graham Harrison (2016) claims that it “has transformed the lives of more than a million of the world’s poorest families”. Indeed, the name graduation was chosen because it was believed that the approach will, in fact, ‘graduate’ people out of poverty. What is the actual evidence on the impacts of the graduation approach? Has it really achieved its stated objective of ‘graduating’ the ‘ultra poor’ out of poverty? This article hopes to answer these questions by examining whether: the beneficiaries of the programme are, in fact, the poorest people; the impacts of the programmes are as significant as claimed; the impacts are sustainable; and the approach is cost-effective.