This paper analyzes a four-arm randomized evaluation of a multi-faceted economic inclusion intervention delivered by the Government of Niger to… Read more female beneficiaries of a national cash transfer program. All three treatment arms include a core package of group savings promotion, coaching, and entrepreneurship training, in addition to the regular cash transfers from the national program. The first variant also includes a lump-sum cash grant and is similar to a traditional graduation intervention (“capital” package). The second variant substitutes the cash grant with psychosocial interventions (“psychosocial” package). The third variant includes the cash grant and the psychosocial interventions (“full” package). The control group only receives the regular cash transfers from the national program. All three treatments generate large impacts on consumption and food security six and 18 months post-intervention. They increase participation and profits in women-led off-farm business and livestock activities, as well as improve various dimensions of psychosocial well-being. The impacts tend to be larger in the full treatment, followed by the capital and psychosocial treatments. Consumption impacts up to 18 months after the intervention already exceed costs in the psychosocial package (the benefit-cost ratio for the psychosocial package is 126 percent; full package, 95 percent; and capital package, 58 percent). These results highlight the value of addressing psychosocial constraints as well as capital constraints in government-implemented poverty reduction programs. Read less ...

This paper studies the long-run effects of a "big-push" program providing a large asset transfer to the poorest Indian households. In… Read more a randomized controlled trial that follows these households over 10 years, we find positive effects on consumption (0.6 SD), food security (0.1 SD), income (0.3 SD), and health (0.2 SD). These effects grow for the first seven years following the transfer and persist until year 10. One main channel for persistence is that treated households take better advantage of opportunities to diversify into more lucrative wage employment, especially through migration. 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 ...

No one should be against giving families living in poverty a few goats, chickens or cattle. Indeed, development projects have… Read more 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. Read less ...

To reduce extreme poverty and break its intergenerational transmission, the Government of Tanzania created the productive social safety net (PSSN).… Read more The specific objective of the PSSN, which is implemented by the Tanzania social action fund (TASAF), is to increase income and consumption and improve the ability to cope with shocks among vulnerable populations, while enhancing and protecting the human capital of their children. This impact evaluation (IE) aims to contribute to the body of evidence on the effectiveness of conditional cash transfers (CCTs), particularly in the sub-Saharan Africa context. The IE design examines the impacts of a large-scale government program using an experimental design. While the baseline report of this IE assessed the PSSN’s targeting performance, the targeting aspects of this report focus on understanding whether recertification is appropriate at this stage. The baseline report provided evidence on how successful the three-stage targeting system - combining geographical, community-based, and a proxy means test - was at identifying the poorest households in Tanzania. This report also aims to identify key implementation factors driving the PSSN’s success and areas where the program can evolve further. The report is divided into following sections: section two gives introduction. Section three describes the context in which the evaluation is conducted. Section four presents the evaluation’s objectives, study design, and methodological issues related to the design. Section five presents in-depth the PSSN impacts on household beneficiaries using the midline data. Section six examines key program implementation aspects, such as the current performance of the targeting and payment systems and transfer adequacy, to identify whether the appropriate amounts are being delivered to the intended beneficiaries on time. Section seven concludes. Read less ...

Can training and mentorship expand the economic impact of cash transfer programs, or would such extensions waste resources that recipients… Read more could allocate more impactfully by themselves? Over the course of two years, a Ugandan nonprofit organization implemented alternative poverty alleviation approaches in a randomized manner. These included an integrated graduation-style program involving cash transfers as well as extensive training and mentorship; a slightly simplified variant excluding training on savings group formation; and a radically simplified approach that monetized all intangibles and delivered cash only. Light-touch behavioral extensions involving goal-setting and plan-making were also implemented with some cash transfer recipients. We find that simplifying the integrated program tended to erode its impact. Read less ...

A multi-faceted program comprising a grant of productive assets, training, coaching, and savings has been found to build sustainable income for… Read more those in extreme poverty. Authors focus on two important questions: whether a mere grant of productive assets would generate similar impacts (it does not), and whether access to a savings account and a deposit collection service would generate similar impacts (it does not). Read less ...

We use a data set from a graduation programme in Rwanda to explore the heterogeneous livelihood pathways that programme participants follow… Read more during and after the programme period. We show that household characteristics, such as gender of household head and labour availability, will affect trajectories of change; yet, the impact of initial resources will depend on what outcomes are being measured and possible complementarities between them. This reinforces the importance of a multi-sectoral strategy for supporting livelihoods. We conclude that certain types of households need longer on a programme, as well as additional support to local enabling factors to support graduation. Read less ...

Can training and mentorship expand the economic impact of cash transfer programs, or would such extensions waste resources that recipients… Read more could allocate more impactfully by themselves? Over the course of two years, a Ugandan nonprofit organization implemented alternative poverty alleviation approaches in a randomized manner. These included an integrated graduation-style program involving cash transfers as well as extensive training and mentorship; a slightly simplified variant excluding training on savings group formation; and a radically simplified approach that monetized all intangibles and delivered cash only. Light-touch behavioral extensions involving goal-setting and plan-making were also implemented with some cash transfer recipients. We find that simplifying the integrated program tended to erode its impact. Read less ...

The Graduation Approach is a holistic livelihoods program which consists of five core components: time-limited consumption support; a savings component;… Read more an asset transfer; training in how to use the asset; and life skills coaching and mentoring. This mix of interventions, offered in the appropriate sequence, helps the ultra-poor to “graduate” out of extreme poverty within a defined time period. Findings from evaluations of the 10 pilots implemented in Asia, Africa and Latin America suggest that the Graduation Approach is an effective and scalable intervention with impacts that are sufficiently robust to persist over time. Based on these interim findings, Ford and CGAP designed an ambitious strategy to reach out to government policy makers to help them understand the potential of the Graduation Approach to serve large numbers of extremely poor people develop sustainable livelihoods and move into the market economy over time. The key is embedding the Graduation Approach in government social protection or large-scale anti-poverty programs. Governments and NGOs will need to adapt the “classic” version of the Graduation Approach as broader integration with social policy happens around the world. Governments face different challenges than NGOs, scaling brings its own set of challenges, and programs must be tailored to address differences in regional contexts. With these factors in mind, the Ford Foundation commissioned case studies of three governments and one large NGO who are scaling the Graduation Approach within their ongoing programs. The Ford Foundation hopes that the lessons provided by the case studies and companion analysis encourage other governments and NGOs to adopt, adapt, and scale an approach that works. Read less ...