Rarely has an antipoverty strategy been evaluated so thoroughly as the Graduation Approach, the holistic livelihood development program popularized by BRAC. The Graduation Approach includes five or more components designed to ensure that beneficiaries—typically the extreme poor—are able to manage or avoid new shocks while finding a pathway out of poverty. Targeted households are provided with consumption support (cash or food assistance) to meet basic daily needs, an income-generating asset (or a combination of assets, most often livestock) along with training in managing the asset, a savings account (or savings groups where banking is unavailable), and coaching or mentoring over a two-year period to reinforce lessons, monitor households’ progress, provide moral support, and help to overcome any challenges along the way.
In 2006 CGAP and the Ford Foundation teamed up to determine whether BRAC’s Ultra-Poor Graduation Approach could be adapted successfully outside Bangladesh. They identified ten partners in eight countries around the world and, with much foresight, invested in an evaluation strategy that would provide an impressive body of evidence once these programs had completed nearly a decade later. Eight of the sites were evaluated with randomized evaluations which were complemented with rigorous qualitative research. Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) conducted seven of the randomized evaluations, with one of the research sites in India managed by our partners at J-PAL. We pooled the data from six1 of the randomized evaluations and published the results in Science (Banerjee et al. 2015).