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. While the Guide will be useful for all graduation implementers, 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.
Pioneered by BRAC, the graduation approach creates livelihood opportunities, increases incomes, reduces vulnerabilities, and builds the resilience of extremely poor families so that they can start the transition to self-sufciency and upward economic mobility. Since its beginnings with BRAC in Bangladesh, the graduation approach has become a global phenomenon, with close to 100 graduation programs in operation at the end of 2017. This Guide draws on the lessons learned from multiple sources: the BRAC experience beginning in 2002 with Targeting the Ultra Poor (TUP), a program reaching more than half a million households in Bangladesh, a subsequent eight-year (2006-2014) global program involving 10 sites in eight countries; scale-ups of some of those programs; and new adaptations of the approach by governments and donor agencies. The graduation approach’s promising results have captured the attention of anti-poverty stakeholders around the world. These stakeholders, which include technical assistance providers, representatives from governments, donor agencies, and NGOs, have coalesced into a global community of practice. They have been testing and adapting the approach and exploring, among other issues, how best to support large-scale adaptation and implementation of the graduation approach by governments. The contributions of this community of practice form the majority of the revisions to the Guide’s contents.
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.