The share of people living in extreme poverty fell from 36 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015 but has… Read more continued to increase in many fragile and conflict-affected areas where half of the extreme poor are expected to reside by 2030. These areas are also where the least evidence exists on how to tackle poverty. This paper investigates whether the Targeting the Ultra Poor program can lift households out of poverty in a fragile context: Afghanistan. In 80 villages in Balkh province, 1,219 of the poorest households were randomly assigned to a treatment or control group. Women in treatment households received a one-off “bigpush” package, including a transfer of livestock assets, cash consumption stipend, skills training, and coaching. One year after the program ended—two years after assets were transferred—significant and large impacts are found across all the primary pre-specified outcomes: consumption, assets, psychological well-being, total time spent working, financial inclusion, and women’s empowerment. Per capita consumption increases by 30 percent (USD 24 purchasing power parity, USD 7 nominal per month) with respect to the control group, and the share of households below the national poverty line decreases from 82 percent in the control group to 62 percent in the treatment group. Using modest assumptions about consumption impacts, the intervention has an estimated internal rate of return of 26 percent, excluding non-monetized improvements in psychological well-being, women’s empowerment, and children’s health and education. These findings suggest that “big-push” interventions can dramatically reduce poverty in fragile and conflict-affected regions. Read less ...

We study two interventions for underemployed youth across five Ethiopian sites: a $300 grant to spur self-employment, and a job… Read more offer to an industrial firm. Despite significant impacts on occupational choice, income, and health in the first year, after five years we see nearly complete convergence across all groups and outcomes. Shortrun increases in productivity and earnings from the grant dissipate as recipients exit their micro-enterprises. Adverse effects of factory work on health found after one year also appear to be temporary. These results suggest that one-time and one-dimensional interventions may struggle to overcome barriers to wage- or selfemployment. Read less ...

Research on the impact of financial services on the lives of low-income people provides valuable insights. However, these studies tend… Read more to focus on microcredit or a single financial product, such as savings or mobile money. As a result, an overly simplistic and product-focused story has emerged. Recognizing the need for a more nuanced and clearer impact narrative, this Focus Note synthesizes evidence since 2014 and highlights three overarching insights: 1) Financial services improve resilience both by facilitating recovery from shocks and encouraging investments that are riskier but potentially more profitable in the longer term. 2) Women’s control and ownership of financial services can improve their bargaining power in the household and enable positive outcomes, such as increasing their participation in the labor force. 3) Emerging evidence suggests that financial inclusion can contribute to increased economic growth and reduced poverty. Other findings demonstrate that expanding access to basic accounts alone is unlikely to result in detectable welfare benefits, while digitizing financial services shows promising effects on poverty but also introduces potential risks (e.g., weakening of social networks). Going forward, more information is needed on context and customer demographics to better understand who benefits from certain financial services and how and under what circumstances financial inclusion may not be beneficial. Read less ...

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs, started in the late 1990s in Latin America, have become the antipoverty program of choice… Read more in many developing countries in the region and beyond. This paper reviews the literature on their long-term impacts on human capital and related outcomes observed after children have reached a later stage of their life cycle, focusing on two life-cycle transitions. The first includes children exposed to CCTs in utero or during early childhood who have reached school ages. The second includes children exposed to CCTs during school ages who have reached young adulthood. Most studies find positive long-term effects on schooling, but fewer find positive impacts on cognitive skills, learning, or socio-emotional skills. Impacts on employment and earnings are mixed, possibly because former beneficiaries were often still too young. A number of studies find estimates that are not statistically different from zero, but for which it is often not possible to be confident that this is due to an actual lack of impact rather than to the methodological challenges facing all long-term evaluations. Developing further opportunities for analyses with rigorous identification strategies for the measurement of long-term impacts should be high on the research agenda. As original beneficiaries age, this should also be increasingly possible, and indeed important before concluding whether or not CCTs lead to sustainable poverty reduction. Read less ...

Interventions in highly insecure and fragile contexts are always confronted with the latent risk of not being able to implement… Read more the program as intended. Despite its high policy relevance, little is known about the impacts of program disruption or cancellation on beneficiaries. This study uses the unplanned cancellation of the South Sudan Youth Business Start-Up Grant Program to assess the socioeconomic, behavioral, and psychological consequences of a program that fails to be implemented as intended. Originally planned as a randomized trial, the Youth Startup Business Grant Program consisted of an unconditional cash grant combined with a business and life skills training targeting the youth in South Sudan. Due to the intensification of violence in the country, the disbursement of the grant was terminated in late 2016 before most of the intended beneficiaries had accessed the grant. The study uses survey data from face-to-face interviews and experimental data from lotteries, trust games, and a list experiment to assess the consequences of the cancellation in a comprehensive form. The empirical analysis employs instrumental variable regressions to control for individual characteristics that might have made it more likely to access the grant before disbursement was frozen. The results show that participants who received the originally planned treatment displayed significant improvements in their consumption, savings, and psychological well-being. However, participants who vainly expected to receive the cash grant showed reduced levels of consumption and women among this subgroup also experienced strong reductions in their trust level. In addition, the study finds some evidence that these women were less likely to migrate. Read less ...

BRAC launched its Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction: Targeting the Ultra Poor (CFPR-TUP) program in 2002 to address ultrapoverty… Read more in Bangladesh using an asset transfer approach combined with multifaceted training over a 2-year period. However, evidence of long-term employment trajectories is limited, and it is crucial to understand whether the program truly has a transformative long-term income effect. We evaluate the long-term impact of TUP on employment using difference-in-differences techniques on panel data from a 9-year period (2002–11). We confirm earlier findings of the positive short-term TUP impact: participants are more likely to switch from less productive occupations (e.g., working as maids, begging, day laboring) to entrepreneurship (up 10 percentage points) and generally maintain these new occupations for the medium term. In the long term, however, a substantial proportion of participating households—especially those with members starting out as beggars or maids, those without adult sons, and those headed by males—are switching back to their lower-income baseline occupations, causing the long-term impact to be smaller (a 5 percentage point increase). As this paper is the first to provide impact estimates over a 9-year period of the TUP program, the findings highlight the need for further research on the causes for this reversal and the extent to which it is found in other settings. Read less ...

People in ultra-poverty make up over half of the estimated 797 million people living in extreme poverty around the world… Read more (Reed et al. 2017, 4). This group tends to be food insecure, typically excluded from mainstream services and programs, including formal market systems and financial services, and in some contexts live in isolated and hard-to-reach areas. To address such a complex and multifaceted problem, it is necessary to implement holistic interventions that make sustainable improvements in the lives of the extreme and ultra-poor. This paper argues that the Graduation approach is one such approach that aims to equip this population with the tools, access to resources, livelihoods, and self-confidence to escape the poverty trap. Read less ...

Rural poverty, a widespread problem for the Paraguayan government over the last decade – as well as for other economies… Read more in the region – , led to the implementation, in 2016 and 2017, of the “Sembrando Oportunidades Familia por Familia” pilot program, an initiative based on the graduation approach to reduce the incidence of extreme poverty in rural areas. Evaluating the intervention results is essential to understand the effectiveness of this approach in reducing poverty in the Paraguayan context, where the government is in charge of its implementation. For this evaluation, an instrumental-variable impact evaluation and a results evaluation were conducted, showing significant positive changes in the treated households’ productive capacity and savings behavior as well in their perception of wellbeing. These results are useful for the design of a program that can help to effectively overcome extreme poverty in this and other developing countries. This exercise is part of the set of evaluations carried out by the Platform for Evaluation and Learning of the Graduation Program in Latin America. Read less ...

Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, poverty alleviation programmes have struggled to reach the ultra-poor. To address this challenge, a growing number of… Read more agencies are adopting a ‘graduation approach’ to moving out of extreme poverty into food security and sustainable livelihoods. This study examines the effects of an integrated graduation programme (combining the economic strengthening component with the child well-being sensitisation component) on the economic well-being of women and households in the Nord region of Burkina Faso. Repeated-measures data were collected at three time points from 360 female adult caregivers in a three-arm cluster-randomised controlled trial conducted among the poorest households in the region. Results of multilevel random-intercept mixed-effectsmodels suggest significant effect of the two intervention arms on increased return from market activities and greater assets owned by the women. Results also show an increase in expenditure on children, although not at the same rate as the increases in womens’ income and profits. Findings provide strong support for the expansion of the graduation approach to help the ultra-poor in different settings. Findings also point to the importance of taking into account existing social relationships within households and suggest the added value of addressing these intra-household dynamics through appropriate programme strategies. Read less ...