The Philippine government is a global leader in the discussion of anti-child labor policies through the Philippine Department of Labor and Employment’s (DOLE) Kabuhayan Para sa Magulang ng Batang Manggagawa (KASAMA) Program. This program provides in-kind transfers of equipment, tools, and/or raw materials and trainings to parents of child laborers in an effort to promote sustainable, alternative forms of income that replace the family’s use of child labor.

Productive asset grants have become an important tool in efforts to push the very poor out of poverty, but they require labor to convert the asset into income. Using a clustered randomized trial, we work with the Government of the Philippines to evaluate a key component of their child labor elimination program, a $518 productive asset grant directed at families with child laborers. Treatment increases household based economic activity. Household well-being improves, mainly through increases in food security and child welfare.

This paper analyzes a four-arm randomized evaluation of a multi-faceted economic inclusion intervention delivered by the Government of Niger to 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).

We use a randomized experiment to compare a workforce training program to cash transfers in Rwanda. Conducted in a sample of poor and underemployed youth, this study measures the impact of the training program not only relative to a control group but relative to the counterfactual of simply disbursing the cost of the program directly to beneficiaries.

States and aid agencies use employment programs to rehabilitate high-risk men in the belief that peaceful work opportunities will deter them from crime and violence. Rigorous evidence is rare. We experimentally evaluate a program of agricultural training, capital inputs, and counseling for Liberian ex-fighters who were illegally mining or occupying rubber plantations. 14 months after the program ended, men who accepted the program offer increased their farm employment and profits, and shifted work hours away from illicit activities.

Almost half of all deaths of children under five years of age are attributable to malnutrition, and despite the decline in numbers, progress continues to be very slow. In Burkina Faso researchers evaluated whether a nutrition-focused livelihoods program consisting of a cash transfer, productive asset, and nutrition intervention can impact child nutrition, household income, and assets. After two years, the program successfully reduced chronic malnutrition by about a third and increased the productive assets of participants.

We evaluate an intervention to raise young women’s economic empowerment in Sierra Leone, where women frequently experience sexual violence and face multiple economic disadvantages. The intervention provides them with a protective space (a club) where they can find support, receive information on health/reproductive issues and vocational training. Unexpectedly, the post-baseline period coincided with the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

Can training and mentorship expand the economic impact of cash transfer programs, or would such extensions waste resources that recipients 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.

Extreme poor populations face multidimensional social, economic, political, and cultural barriers, in addition to a low income. They are often chronically food insecure, geographically isolated and excluded from the community, vulnerable to health and natural shocks, disconnected from mainstream social protection services and traditional development programs, with low access to markets.

Central to the Graduation approach is the understanding that extreme poverty encompasses a multidimensional set of challenges not limited to 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.

In BRAC’s Graduation approach, coaching is an integral component that cuts across all four of its foundational pillars (livelihoods promotion, social protection, financial inclusion, and social empowerment) that collectively enable a household to build its resilience and uplift themselves out of extreme poverty. Coaching takes the form of regular touchpoints between participants and program staff and is critical in boosting their confidence, guiding on livelihood management, resolving challenges, adopting positive behavior, and monitoring household welfare.

Extreme poverty and climate change are intrinsically linked: As climate change worsens, it compounds systemic inequalities and exacerbates issues of poverty, food insecurity, and injustice. BRAC UPGI works with governments and other partners to help lift people out of extreme poverty with climate resilient livelihoods and support. Climate change disproportionately impacts the Global South and disproportionately harms the poorest and most vulnerable populations around the world.

BRAC’s Graduation approach is a comprehensive, timebound, integrated and sequenced set of interventions that enable extreme poor households to achieve socioeconomic resilience, in order to progress along a pathway out of extreme poverty. Although traditionally developed for rural communities, the Graduation approach has been adapted to urban contexts to meet the growing challenges linked to urbanization and address the unique needs of urban slum populations.

People in ultra-poverty make up over half of the estimated 797 million people living in extreme poverty around the world (Reed et al. 2017, 4). This group tends to be food insecure, typically excluded from mainstream services and programs, including formal market systems and financial services, and in some contexts live in isolated and hard-to-reach areas. To address such a complex and multifaceted problem, it is necessary to implement holistic interventions that make sustainable improvements in the lives of the extreme and ultra-poor.

Social and economic inclusion programs can act as a prime vessel to connect youth with economic opportunities. Skills development programs 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.

The ultra-poor need to stop being invisible to policymakers. We need to pay closer attention to the poorest and the 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.

Microfinance is about extending financial access to poor and excluded people. However, apart from a few notable exceptions, microfinance has not typically reached extremely poor people—those at the lowest level of the economic ladder. The majority of the world’s estimated 150 million microcredit clients are thought to live just below and, more often, just above the poverty line.

Since 2016, Fundación Capital, along with the Secretariat of Development and Social Inclusion (SEDIS) of Honduras and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), has worked on the design and adaptation of the graduation model as part of the Bono Vida Mejor [Better Life Voucher] conditional cash transfer program of the government of Honduras. This joint development process led to the establishment of the Emprendiendo una Vida Mejor - EVM program. Implementation of the program began in July 2018 with 840 families in three departments: Copán, Lempira and El Paraíso.

The State of Economic Inclusion Report 2021 sheds light on one of the most intractable challenges faced by development policy makers and practitioners: transforming the economic lives of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. Economic inclusion programs are a bundle of coordinated, multidimensional interventions that support individuals, households, and communities so they can raise their incomes and build their assets. Programs targeting the extreme poor and vulnerable groups are now under way in 75 countries.

This scoping paper documents current practices used by Graduation Program practitioners to produce meaningful and sustainable improvements in women’s wellbeing. To do so, it builds on the theory of change in Rao and Kelleher (2005) and adapted by Hillenbrand (2015) and identify practices that affect change along two dimensions: from individual to community levels and from the formal to the informal. We document a number of ways in which such programs attempt to affect change beyond the more traditional aims of alleviating resource and liquidity constraints.