Powerpoint slides providing an overview of evidence on graduation programs in refugee and conflict-affected settings… Read more Read less ...

Refugees have been supported by innumerable cash or voucher interventions implemented by international humanitarian and development actors during the Covid-19… Read more pandemic, but only a few of these have explicitly aligned or integrated with government social protection responses. Refugees residing in low- and middle-income countries have mostly been excluded from government social protection responses, and where they have been included (largely in Latin America and the Caribbean) this typically represents a continuation of pre-pandemic policy. This paper reviews the evidence on: 1. The inclusion of refugees in government-led social protection responses to Covid-19 in the Republic of Congo and Colombia 2. The alignment or integration of international humanitarian and development actors’ cash assistance to refugees and government social protection responses – focusing on Jordan and Pakistan. Read less ...

Central to the Graduation approach is the understanding that extreme poverty encompasses a multidimensional set of challenges not limited to… Read more low incomes. While extreme poverty afflicts both women and men, women are particularly vulnerable because of barriers created by unequal gender dynamics. Women play a critical role in social and economic development by investing a higher proportion of their earnings in their families compared to men, thus improving outcomes for entire households. Based on this premise, BRAC’s Graduation approach aims to empower women as agents of change within a household and the broader community. Read less ...

The ultra-poor need to stop being invisible to policymakers. We need to pay closer attention to the poorest and the… Read more unique set of challenges they face, for without a better understanding of the lived reality of ultra-poverty, we will fail to live up to the promise of “leaving no one behind.” Without programs tailored for people in these circumstances, the extreme poverty rate will become increasingly hard to budge. We are already starting to see this reflected in global poverty data. This chapter seeks to advance an understanding of the microeconomic and psychological reality of what it means to be ultra-poor, while pointing to an emerging set of scalable, science-based solutions that can break the trap. “The poor” are not a homogenous group, and even the term “extreme poor” is often used to lump together people facing very different circumstances. Using the graduation approach pioneered by BRAC as one example, this chapter will highlight ways to tackle ultra-poverty through the emerging “science of hope,” which posits that when coupled with skills and material support, an injection of well-founded hope and optimism into the lives of the ultra-poor can break the poverty trap. Read less ...

Social and economic inclusion programs can act as a prime vessel to connect youth with economic opportunities. Skills development programs… Read more are particularly proven to put youth on a pathway out of poverty. In the Graduation Approach (one of the most rigorously tested and proven social and economic inclusion approaches), for example, skills development elements are incorporated in program design to train participants on how to profit from income generating assets and strategically save resulting income. In a recent youth-inclusive Graduation program in Kenya, for example, participants saw substantial increases in savings, skills, and general happiness resulting from program interventions, which included technical and business skills development through individual and group mentorship. Read less ...

This report provides an overview of the work of the Refugee Economies Programme during the last five years. Its aim… Read more is to offer accessible summaries of the Programme’s publications and other activities. It highlights the ways in which the Programme has collaborated with other organisations in order to ensure its research has impact. Refugees and forced displacement are among the defining issues of our time. Every year, conflict and persecution cause millions of people to flee their homes and communities. In the context of climate change and the economic legacy of COVID-19, numbers will increase. Meanwhile, the willingness of countries – rich and poor – to receive refugees is threatened by rising populist nationalism. This creates a major policy challenge: how to create sustainable forms of refugee protection, which can enable a growing number of displaced people to access their full range of human rights. Read less ...

Fundación Capital, with the support of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), is currently carrying out a Graduation Project in… Read more Paraguay with a transformative gender-based approach within the framework of Programa Abrazo (The Hug Program) of the Ministry of Childhood and Adolescence. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the project had to be modified and required design and activity adjustments for the different contexts in order to maintain ties with participants, even with preventive social distancing measures. Understanding the women’s reality during the pandemic was crucial to develop strategies to mitigate the socio-economic effects of the crisis. This is why Fundación Capital performed a study with 479 women from Programa Abrazo to know how the pandemic had impacted their personal economy and the strategies they had used to face the crisis. Read less ...

It was with that in mind that Zita Akwero, Village Enterprise’s Uganda Regional Manager, highlighted (during a recent webinar to… Read more recognize International Women’s Day) how TaroWorks’ offline mobile field service app, Salesforce.com and the data they collect and analyze are helping empower both the women hired by Village Enterprise to act as business mentors and women in the poverty alleviation program who the mentors train and advise. Zita exemplifies how women can advance by acquiring technology and data skills, having started out as a business mentor herself who learned how to successfully use Salesforce dashboards to plan her daily tasks. Now, she’s managing teams of business mentors for an entire region and is enabling them to use technology and data. Read less ...

Blog post on behavioral, social and emotional side of refugee integration into the labor market that is often overlooked… Read more Read less ...

In 2021, with the support of the Digital Development Partnership, administered by the World Bank, and the EQUALS Global Partnership… Read more Access Coalition, Trickle Up teamed up with AVSI Foundation Uganda to test two approaches for women’s digital literacy and inclusion. This guide aims to help Digital Literacy coaches prepare for, facilitate, and document what took place during each of the digital literacy training sessions with EQUALS project participants. Read less ...