There is hardly any argument over the necessity of targeting the ultra-poor in development interventions. However, identifying and scaling up… Read more effective strategies to improve livelihoods remains a challenge. A few recent pilots have found an approach that combines transfer of productive assets, and intensive supports and supervision with a set of coordinated interventions following a time-bound exit plan successful. This paper evaluates one such pilot, known as ‘ultrapoor graduation pilot’, implemented by BRAC in Afghanistan. We find that participating households have successfully utilised the livestock received from the programme to increase employment and income. This income growth has also allowed them to improve dietary diversity through consumption of more home-grown food items. Beneficiaries also increased their livestock holdings beyond what they received from the programme. We find relatively stronger impacts on investments compared to consumption indicating a shift towards longer term planning among the beneficiaries. Given its effectiveness, this model should be strongly considered for scale-up in Afghanistan. We also suggest a couple of potential areas that need to be considered for improving the effectiveness of this model even further. Read less ...

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) manages public works programmes to provide transfers to vulnerable, food-insecure… Read more and/or crisis-affected households in return for the provision of labour (particularly through labour-intensive construction and rehabilitation projects). The two main objectives of public works programmes are to: (i) provide income opportunities and increase consumption of goods; and (ii) build or repair assets and infrastructure that are vital for sustaining the livelihoods of a community. FAO manages three types of public works programmes: cash-for–work (CFW), voucher-for-work (VFW) and food-for-work (FFW). These programmes can address both short-term and chronic poverty and improve the asset base, thus helping to alleviate poverty in the medium and long terms. The purpose of these Guidelines is to provide FAO staff with a framework for the design and implementation of public works programmes that respond to a wide range of needs. Read less ...

The world’s poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale… Read more and long-term randomized control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of agricultural labor and into running small businesses. This shift, which persists and strengthens after assistance is withdrawn, leads to a 38% increase in earnings. Inculcating basic entrepreneurship, where severely disadvantaged women take on occupations which were the preserve of non-poor women, is shown to be a powerful means of transforming the economic lives of the poor. Read less ...

It is frequently claimed that the most innovative feature of social protection, in contrast to safety nets, is that it… Read more has the potential to reduce the vulnerability of poor people to the extent that they can manage moderate risk without external support. This has led to an expansion of large-scale ‘productive safety net’ programmes. The potential to reduce vulnerability so that people can move off social protection provision is popularly termed ‘graduation’.1 However, the vision for graduation rests on the assumption of the existence of a large population of low-productivity, risk-prone and often poor households. Under this scenario, if risk can be underwritten through appropriate social protection then significant numbers of poor people have the potential to move out of vulnerability and extreme poverty into more productive and resilient livelihoods.The ambition of this paper is to map out the theory of change underpinning the notion of graduation and to set out, conceptually and empirically, the range of enabling and constraining factors that facilitate or undermine this change process. Read less ...

Social protection policies aim to reduce socio-economic risks, vulnerability, extreme poverty and deprivation, while smallholder agricultural policies focus on improving… Read more productivity in crops, fisheries, forestry and livestock and improving access to markets. Both areas of policy are important in poverty reduction strategies, but little attention has been paid to the interaction between them and how that influences their design and implementation. This study explores the interaction between formal social protection and agriculture by proposing a theory of change and conducting an empirical review that identifies how social protection impacts agricultural production and how agricultural interventions reduce risks and vulnerability at the household and local economy levels. The paper seeks to provide an empirical rationale for building synergies and coordinating complementarities between social protection and smallholder agriculture in developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. The review also provides some insights to the FAO and its partners on how social protection and agriculture can potentially complement each other. Read less ...

Alternative scenarios are considered for reducing by one billion the number of people surviving on less than $1.25 a day.… Read more The low-case, “pessimistic” path to that goal envisages the developing world outside China returning to the slower pace of economic growth and poverty reduction of the 1980s and 1990s, but with China maintaining its progress. This path would take 50 years or more to lift one billion people out of poverty. A more optimistic path is identified that would maintain the developing world's (impressive) progress against absolute poverty since the turn of the century. This path would lift one billion people out of poverty by 2025–30. The optimistic path is consistent with both linear projections of the time-series data and nonlinear simulations of inequality-neutral growth for the developing world as a whole. Read less ...

This paper documents the results of a qualitative evaluation of the Ultra Poor Program, a pilot poverty alleviation program implemented… Read more by Swayam Krishi Sangam NGO in Andhra Pradesh, two and a half years after it ended. Over a 4-week period in January and February 2012, we spoke with over 60 women, of who around 35 had participated in the SKS pilot. This study is part of a wider research agenda in which research teams are following up with program members at least a year after the end of the program to understand how sustainable any positive outcomes of the various graduation pilots have been. We begin by describing the graduation model and the conceptual innovations that gave rise to this particular approach to poverty alleviation. Next, we provide a detailed description of the SKS’s Ultra Poor Program and its unique aspects vis-a-vis the other pilots. In the third section, we describe the results of earlier evaluations of the pilot, both quantitative and qualitative. Finally, we present the findings of our research, which was conducted between January and March of 2012. We conclude with recommendations for SKS to consider as it moves forward with scaling up the Ultra Poor Program in other locations. In brief, we find that the sustainability of the program's outcomes has been uneven. While many social and financial behaviors inculcated by the program seem to have dropped off, many members seem to be continuing to benefit from the livelihood aspects of the program. Furthermore, the heightened political energy in Andhra Pradesh has caused disruptions in the microfinance industry and has greatly expanded social safety nets for poor people; both of which have had serious implications for the Ultra Poor Program's target group. Read less ...

Conventional government schemes and microfinance interventions have struggled to reach the poorest and help them escape the confines of extreme… Read more poverty. In response, BRAC, Bangladesh‟s largest non-governmental organisation (NGO), developed an innovative approach that combined livelihood creation, financial services and safety nets in order to „graduate‟ participants out of extreme poverty and toward a sustainable livelihood. Inspired by BRAC‟s success, CGAP and the Ford Foundation launched an initiative to test and adapt BRAC‟s approach in a diversity of countries and contexts through their Graduation Programme. This paper focuses upon two Graduation Programme implementations – one by Trickle Up in West Bengal, India, and the other by Orangi Charitable Trust (OCT) in Sindh, Pakistan. We use the „critical moments‟ framework developed in Kabeer (2008) to understand the conceptualisation of this project in response to a particular set of constraints (and opportunities), its translation into a concrete set of proposals for action, the implementation of these proposals, the monitoring and evaluation of the process of implementation, and finally, the utilisation of the lessons thus learnt. As a part of this process, we explain the way in which individual participants‟ have experienced the Graduation programme - the extent to which they benefited, the extent to which it is not so clear, and the multitude of factors behind these dynamics. Read less ...

Standard economic theory suggests that one-time business grants can have at most temporary effects, and accordingly, policies to increase incomes… Read more of the self-employed in developing countries typically rely on sustained engagement. In contrast, we found long-lasting impacts from one-time grants given in a randomized experiment to subsistence firms. Five years after we gave $100 or $200 to 115 of 197 male and 100 of 190 female Sri Lankan microenterprise owners, we found 10-percentage-point-higher enterprise survival rates, and $8-to-$12-per-month-higher profits for male-owned businesses that received the grants. Female-owned businesses showed no long-term (or short-term) impacts. Our follow-up investigation interviewed 94% of the original sample and collected survivorship data from the remaining 6%, demonstrating that tracking long-term outcomes is both feasible and worthwhile. The results suggest that one-off grants may have lasting impacts on some types of subsistence firms, challenging the view that sustained engagement is always required. Read less ...

Ethiopia's Food Security Programme provides income transfers through public works in its Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) as well as… Read more targeted services provided through the Other Food Security Programme (OFSP) and, later, the Household Asset Building Programme (HABP) designed to improve agricultural productivity. There is a trade-off in these two types of transfers between short-term improvements in food security and longer term food security achieved through increased agricultural productivity. Using the dose – response models of Hirano and Imbens (2004), we investigate the relative impact of PSNP transfers alone and joint transfers from the PSNP and OFSP/HABP on agricultural output, yields, fertiliser use and agricultural investment for farmers growing cereals in Ethiopia from 2006 to 2010. We find that access to the OFSP/ HABP programme plus high levels of payments from the PSNP led to consid-erable improvements in the use of fertiliser and enhanced investments in agriculture likely to improve agricultural productivity among households re-ceiving both programmes. We find mixed effects of participation in both programmes in terms of impacts on yields. We also find that high levels of participation in the PSNP programme alone had no effect on agricultural input use or productivity and limited impact on agricultural investments. Read less ...