The Sustainable Livelihood Program - Employment Facilitation Track (SLP-EF Track) is a scheme that facilitates the employment of the Pantawid… Read more Pamilyang Philipino Program (4Ps) beneficiaries. The SLP-EF Track has much potential to bring the 4Ps beneficiaries closer to reaching the poverty threshold since getting employed would provide additional income to the beneficiaries on top of the incentives provided to them by the 4Ps. For this to be realized, however, the SLP-EF Track would have to be effective in targeting beneficiaries and in identifying employment partners for 4Ps. There is also need for the Department of Social Welfare and Development to reassess its role in employment facilitation and to effectively link the 4Ps to other labor employment programs of government. The assessment probes into the number of activities that have been conducted by the research team in evaluating the SLP-EF Track process. Read less ...

Investing in women is said to be a key to development. In this view, providing education, a cow, or the… Read more ingredients for a business will result in great things: increases in income, empowerment, social inclusion, and improved mental health. In this study, IPA researchers studied whether the most vulnerable women could start and sustain small businesses. They evaluated a program by AVSI Uganda, the Women’s INcome Generating Support (WINGS) program. WINGS offered extremely poor people basic business skills training, ongoing mentorship, and cash grants with a purchasing power of $375. The message: the poorest women have high returns to cash, training and supervision. Not only can cash-centered programs help the poorest start and sustain microenterprises, but they do so cost-effectively. Moving ahead, there are ways to improve cost-effectiveness, and programs should note that higher incomes alone may not address women’s social and personal challenges. Read less ...

For many years, aid agencies, researchers, advocates for displaced people and refugees and IDPs themselves have all called for investments… Read more in self-reliance and livelihoods as an important step towards overcoming the costly inadequacies of the present aid regime. Despite the great deal of writing that has been done on the subject, there has been no systematic examination of the evidence on the effectiveness and impact of actual self-reliance and livelihood interventions. This paper aims to help fill that gap, first by drawing a snapshot of global protracted displacement and then by exploring how aid agencies and governments have contributed to sustainable livelihoods among the long term displaced. Section 1 discusses the dimensions and characteristics of global protracted displacement and the extent of international resources directed towards the problem. Section 2 summarises the state of evidence uncovered in a comprehensive literature review. Section 3 reviews the literature on self-reliance and livelihood investments, analyses the theories of change underpinning those investments and suggests some possible future directions, based on the limited evidence available. Section 4 proposes a typology for understanding the opportunities and challenges in supporting self-reliance and livelihood activities in specific situations of protracted displacement. The findings of the paper are also drawn from four country case studies, in Sudan/Darfur, Colombia (IDPs), Uganda and Jordan (refugees). Read less ...

Understanding poverty and how to measure and eradicate it has evolved over the last 20 years to incorporate a multidimensional… Read more focus. The experience of Women for Women International (WfWI), a US- based non-profit organisation that works with women survivors of war in eight countries, shows that while economic inputs are crucial for moving above the US$1.25/day poverty line, a more holistic approach is needed for ultra-poor women in conflict-affected situations to achieve this goal. This article analyses WfWI’s 12-month social protection training and cash transfer programme for ultra-poor labour-constrained women in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The programme helps women obtain skills and resources to graduate from poverty and promote overall wellbeing for their families and communities. We first provide background on social protection programmes in conflict settings, then outline data collection methodology and the WfWI core programme, and lastly, we discuss our findings and opportunities for further analysis. Read less ...

The Graduation model programme, also known as Terintambwe (‘Step ahead’), was launched in two provinces of Burundi, Cibitoke and Kirundo,… Read more in April 2013. In each province, 500 poor households were selected to receive ‘high treatment’ (T1) support from Concern Worldwide, another 500 households were selected to receive ‘low treatment’ (T2) support – the main difference being in the number of home visits – and 300 similarly poor households were allocated to a control group, which allowed for a quasi-experimental ‘difference-in-differences’ research design. The mixed methods impact evaluation of the Terintambwe programme included a quantitative baseline survey, midline survey and endline survey that covered all 2,600 households (with an attrition rate of 10% over the three rounds), as well as regular monitoring and two rounds of qualitative fieldwork around the same time as the baseline and endline surveys. This report presents the findings of the endline quantitative and qualitative surveys, and analyses trends across the three rounds of data collection and the monitoring surveys. Findings are disaggregated by ‘high treatment’ versus ‘low treatment’ and by province. Terintambwe households received support in the form of monthly cash transfers (in the first year), access to savings and borrowing facilities, skills training and coaching, working capital for income-generating activities, a mobile phone, and advice on establishing kitchen gardens. Read less ...

Graduation programmes aim to provide a sequenced and intensive package of support to very poor people, with the objective of… Read more facilitating their movement out of extreme poverty towards resilient and sustainable livelihoods. The package usually includes regular cash transfers, productive assets, access to savings facilities, livelihood training and coaching. The success of first generation ‘graduation model’ programmes in Bangladesh has prompted pilot projects in several countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. This Editorial Introduction reviews alternative conceptualisations of graduation, summarises the evidence on impacts from several project evaluations presented in this IDS Bulletin, and discusses key aspects of design and implementation, including targeting, monitoring, ‘asset-ness’, labour market linkages and the nature of political support for graduation. The editors conclude that graduation programmes are an important and valuable contribution to development policy, but they should not displace the core social protection functions of social assistance and social insurance. Read less ...

Asset-based approaches – usually involving asset transfers and/or asset building – are increasingly central to thinking about poverty alleviation, social… Read more protection, graduation and livelihood resilience. Although the notion of assets is well established in the literature, the meanings of and relationships between asset(s), livelihood capital(s), risks(s), welfare and wellbeing, and graduation need further analysis. We examine issues arising from asset-based approaches to poverty reduction and introduce the idea of ‘asset-ness’ – the qualities and characteristics of different assets – which have received little attention from those promoting or designing asset-based social protection programmes. We argue that asset-ness provides a key to understanding differences in the impacts of asset-based social protection and associated processes and dynamics of graduation. As such the article aims to advance understanding of graduation theory. We develop this argument with reference to domestic livestock, which are commonly distributed to poor people as part of asset-based poverty alleviation and social protection programmes. Read less ...

In the last decade social cash transfer programmes have become extremely popular in sub-Saharan Africa, and are often portrayed as… Read more an instrument that can facilitate graduation out of poverty. The evidence on whether social cash transfers have had actual effects on graduation, however, is limited. This article provides a cross-country reflection of the potential effects of social cash transfers on graduation, drawing from impact evaluation results of cash transfer programmes in Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho and Zambia. We analyse whether social cash transfers have improved the likelihood of graduation, through increased productivity, income generation and resilience to shocks. We identify which factors in terms of programme implementation and household characteristics can increase the likelihood of cash transfer programmes facilitating graduation from poverty. Read less ...

The Haitian NGO Fonkoze, with the support of Concern Worldwide, has been implementing the Chemin Lavi Miyo (CLM) Graduation Programme… Read more since June 2007 which targets the extreme poor in Haiti. Early results were promising, but questions prevailed around the sustainability of benefits. To address these concerns a further round of data collection was undertaken amongst a group of participants four years after graduation. Using a poverty scorecard to record information on housing quality, ownership of assets, household income and livelihoods, it was possible to assess that the mean level of asset-holding remained higher than at baseline, but had slipped back slightly since graduation. Between graduation and the ex post survey 31 per cent continued on an upward trajectory, 39 per cent consolidated their position, but 30 per cent had slipped back considerably, suggesting the need for a more comprehensive social protection system than can be offered by an NGO-implemented programme. Read less ...

Rwanda demonstrates how a process of community consultation and participation is able to identify and rank community members according to… Read more ‘social poverty’, drawing on the Ubudehe tradition which is considered a strength of Rwanda's social fabric. However, with the Ubudehe categorisation now the basis for determining eligibility to a range of social benefits, the process has come under some strain. This article highlights two issues related to targeting and graduation: (1) the difficulty in identifying the poor/non-poor and ranking the population using community participatory techniques; and (2) the sensitivity of eligibility criteria and graduation thresholds to different targeting modalities. Our primary interest is to establish whether improvements for identifying the poor and non-poor can be made without undermining community ownership and what these improvements would look like. This will be useful for policymakers in Rwanda as the new five-year development strategy places importance on graduating households out of extreme poverty. Read less ...