Emerging Evidence and Lessons on the Ultra-Poor Graduation Approach (Part One)
Part One: Adapting the Approach to Context
By Andie Procopio, IMPAQ International
If you are working with food security and resilience programming, chances are you have heard about the Ultra-Poor Graduation Approach, or simply the Graduation Approach. Originally developed in 2002 by the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee (BRAC) in Bangladesh, it has gained international recognition as a key strategy to building secure, sustainable, and resilient livelihoods. Its uniqueness lies in the holistic approach that combines and carefully sequences interventions over a limited amount of time, merging components of social protection, livelihoods, nutrition, WASH, and financial inclusion.
What do we mean when we say ultra-poor? According to the World Bank, the extreme poor refers to over 783 million people globally who live on less than $1.90 USD per day. The ultra-poor live on less than this amount and are the lowest-earning and most-vulnerable subset of the extreme poor population. Children account for 44 percent of the global extreme poor and poverty rates are highest among children, particularly girls.
The Ultra-Poor Graduation Approach starts by providing food for participants and continues to do that throughout the 18–24-month program to ensure day-to-day survival and enable participants to focus on the activities. Participants are then supported to find a viable and sustainable livelihood at the same time as they receive life skills trainings and coaching to improve nutrition and WASH practices, send their children to school, and create hope and aspirations for the future. Savings and loan groups are another important component along with assets transfer, which can include cash transfers, livestock, or a sewing machine, for example.
To learn more about the Ultra-Poor Graduation Approach, click here.
In this blog series, I will introduce three food security and resilience activities funded by USAID and explore how they have applied the Graduation Approach. The content comes from a recent webinar organized by IDEAL, where field-based staff from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Uganda talked about their respective experiences in applying the approach and compared challenges and successes during a panel discussion.
We will start by exploring how the three activities have adapted the standard Graduation Approach to their specific context (blog 1). Next, we will dive into the preliminary results and outcomes (blog 2) to draw some lessons learned and emerging evidence of what works and what doesn’t (blog 3). Lastly, we will look at how the activities have adapted the Graduation Approach to the COVID-19 pandemic (blog 4).
The three activities listed in this series are the Graduating to Resilience Activity in Uganda, Nobo Jatra Activity in Bangladesh, and Livelihoods for Resilience Activity in Ehiopia.
Adaptations for cost effectiveness
Each of the three activities are staying true to the standard Graduation Approach, but each of them have also diverged somewhat from the original design to explore opportunities for cost effectiveness and to better meet the needs of their participants. For instance:
● Graduating to Resilience contextualized the Graduation Approach to work equally well with both refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ugandans in the sub-counties that surround the refugee settlement.
● Livelihoods for Resilience places a heavy emphasis on the enabling environment, believing that more equitable gender norms and inclusive market systems (and particularly the presence of “last-mile” input and service providers in rural communities) are enabling conditions critical for project participants and the communities in which they live.
● Nobo Jatra provides a variation of technical skills training by delivering an intensive entrepreneurial literacy training weekly twice for six months, not only focusing on technical capacities and business acumen, but also building confidence and self-efficacy.
This table provides an overview of the components across all three activities.
It is important to note that both Nobo Jatra and Graduating to Resilience are currently testing cost effectiveness of the Graduation Approach through randomized control trials (RCTs). The RCTs are examining if particularly expensive components, such as the asset transfer and individual coaching, are feasible when the approach is scaled and if these components can be removed or replaced by another component (e.g. group coaching instead of individual). As an example, in the Graduating to Resilience activity, each group coach works with three groups of 25 households, bringing the cost down to approximately 80% of that of the standard Graduation Approach.
Outcomes from these RCTs will provide valuable evidence to help us better understand the optimal package of interventions and provide information on cost-effective implementation for both donors and program implementers.
Using Savings Groups as Platforms for Learning and Discussion
The original design of savings and financial inclusion has expanded beyond only group-based savings in all three activities. Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) in Graduating to Resilience and Nobo Jatra and Village Economic Social Associations in Livelihoods for Resilience use the savings groups as a platform for information sharing, group discussion, and additional skill building such as:
● Awareness and messaging on health, hygiene, and gender-based violence; access to health and hygiene products through village agents who serve as last mile access points; entrepreneurial and literacy training; confidence life skills; technical capacities and business acumen in Nobo Jatra.
● Financial literacy, gender norms, enterprise selection and management, climate change adaptation, and nutrition in Livelihoods for Resilience.
● Gender norms; financial literacy; enterprise selection, planning, and management in Graduating to Resilience.
Layering and Integration
All three activities have adapted their approach to partner with local or national governments and/or other programs for cost-effectiveness and sustainability.
Livelihoods for Resilience:
● Integrates with the Government of Ethiopia (GOE)-sponsored Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), the second largest social safety net program in Africa, for targeting extremely poor households. Households that are part of the PSNP are receiving a monthly conditional cash or food stipend, which services as the consumption support component of the Graduation Approach.
● Implements the GOE livelihoods component for PSNP in project districts.
Nobo Jatra:
● Uses multi-sectoral approaches that layer this activity with parallel Nobo Jatra interventions to provide messaging on WASH, disaster risk reduction, gender equality and social inclusion, and nutrition. This layering strengthens impact and increases the likelihood of households staying out of poverty in the long term, for instance 98% of participants have access to safe drinking water compared to 52% at baseline.
● Coordinates with the digital financial service provider bKash. Nobo Jatra advocates for best practices including digitalization of cash transfers to be transferred directly to e-wallets linked to mobile phone SIM cards, supplementing transfers with social behavior change (through mobile phones and in-person), reducing targeting errors through digitizing and coordinating with the local government.
● Provides information on government-funded social safety nets so participants know what services are available and how to access programs such as support for pregnant and lactating women and allowances for widows.
Graduating to Resilience:
● Conducts an initial mapping of Government of Uganda (GOU), NGO, and private sector products and services available in the host community and refugee settlement for linkages and referrals, including: GOU sub-county agriculture extension workers to provide livestock and agriculture support services to participants; as well as health centers; social protection support; psycho-social services, and the police.
● Engages Villages Health Teams (VHTs) to cooperate with activity coaches for nutrition screening and referrals and thereby engaging existing community-based government structures for increased sustainability and long-term access to health and nutrition services.
● Partners with private sector entities who complement the activity-led Farmer Field Business Schools with additional agronomic technical skills.
Summary
All three activities modified the traditional Graduation Approach by:
1) Testing cost-effective approaches
2) Expanding the purpose of savings groups to use these platforms for discussion, learning, skills building, and knowledge sharing
3) Layering and integrating with other programs and the government
Each activity also found unique ways to adapt to their contexts, for instance placing heavy emphasis on the enabling environment and modifying approaches for two populations — refugee and host community. The graduation approach was designed to be adapted and scaled. However, this should be done using data, information, and stakeholder input to drive decision-making. Engaging communities and local governments is essential when conducting thorough context analyses to ensure local relevance and feasibility of the Graduation Approach and to consider adaptations to suit the needs of the target population. Evidence from the two RCTs will provide information to the technical evidence base on cost-effective programming for scaling the Graduation Approach to the greatest number of ultra-poor households. As the BRAC Propel Toolkit emphasizes, “the time is now to adapt and scale up graduation programming for populations of the ultra-poor around the world.”
Click here for Part 2 of the series, where we go over some of the preliminary outcomes and findings from these activities.
