Resources| Publication| April 1, 2018

From Extreme Poverty to Sustainable Livelihoods: A Technical Guide to the Graduation Approach

This technical guide provides a roadmap for those wishing to implement programs based on the graduation approach—an integrated, carefully sequenced, multi-dimensional intervention to address extreme poverty. This second edition of the Guide captures all the lessons learned and good practice from the early stages of graduation implementation but it is especially aimed at government policymakers and social protection agencies that operate at nationwide scale and are seeking to incorporate the graduation approach, or elements of it, into their programs.

This Guide draws on the lessons learned from multiple sources, including BRAC’s Targeting the Ultra-Poor program, which reached more than half a million households in Bangladesh and the CGAP-Ford Foundation’s global program involving 10 sites in eight countries from 2006-2014. The new edition also includes lessons from Ford Foundation-supported case studies from four countries (Colombia, Ethiopia, India, and Peru) where the approach was scaled up significantly, in all but one of those cases (India) via embedding the approach within government-implemented social protection programs. In addition to new content, volume two of the Guide features interactive digital technology that enables the reader to navigate easily through its content and provides embedded links to annexes, reference materials, and videos.