Emerging Evidence and Lessons on the Ultra-Poor Graduation Approach (Part Three)
Part Three: Lessons Learned
By Andie Procopio, IMPAQ International
In this third part of our series, we will look at some key lessons learned among the three USAID-funded food security and resilience activities that are adapting the Ultra-Poor Graduation Approach (Graduation Approach). We will look closer at each of the following areas:
- The importance of using a participatory approach to targeting
- How to achieve nutrition outcomes
- Engaging the private sector
- How to address gender and cultural norms
These lessons not only support the USAID 2020 Gender Equity and Women’s Empowerment Policy, the USAID 2014–2025 Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Strategy, and USAID’s Private Sector Engagement Strategy, but they also directly contribute to the USAID Food Assistance and Food Security Programmatic Learning Agenda.
As a reminder, this four-part blog series is based on a recent webinar organized by the IDEAL activity in 2020. Part One explored the foundations of the Graduation Approach and how the three activities adapted the approach to their context, and Part Two detailed emerging outcomes for each of the three activities detailed below:
Participatory Approaches to Targeting
All three activities have learned lessons through their work in identifing extremely poor households in their communities to be considered for interventions. These lessons provide further evidence to support the targeting line of inquiry in the Learning Agenda’s Theme 6: Access and Inclusion, by sharing different processes and approaches to conducting participatory rural appraisals (PRAs).
Graduating to Resilience piloted their PRA process, before scaling it up, to ensure their methodologies were effectively targeting extremely poor households. Through this testing process, they were able to determine that it was best to implement the social mapping exercise to identify all extremely poor households prior to moving to more participatory aspects of targeting, such as the poverty wealth ranking.
Additionally, Graduating to Resilience found that the use of locally conceptualized poverty classifications allows for better alignment of objectives to reach the extremely poor. Involving the community in selecting participants improves trust between communities and the activity. Graduating to Resilience collected qualitative data that showed earning the trust of communities was critical to successful implementation in a context where little trust existed between different communities, within communities, and between communities and other implementing organizations. Additionally, this activity used a public lottery to randomly (and transparently) select households identified as extremely poor to the various treatment arms and the control group, thereby increasing trust between the activity and communities. See this report to learn more about the PRA used by Graduating to Resilience, including the pilot-and-scale methodology and public lotteries used to effectively target extremely poor households in and around the Rwamwanja refugee settlement.
Nobo Jatra and Livelihoods for Resilience work with government entities to target ultra-poor households. Livelihoods for Resilience targets households that are participants of the Government of Ethiopia’s (GOE) Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), therefore participant eligibility is not determined by the activity, but rather by the GOE PSNP. However, participants need to voluntarily join a Village Economic Social Association (VESAs) to participate in the activity.
Nobo Jatra uses the following steps to work with the government to identify ultra-poor participants:
- Verify participants through a three-level verification process that also involves communities used to reach the ultra-poor
- Involve the local government to identify the poorest participants
- Consult with the final selected participants to receive their commitment to continue with the process of ultra-poor graduation
Improving Food Security and Nutrition
The three activities use different approaches for improved nutrition and food security outcomes. These lessons are critical, as more information is needed to understand how to improve nutrition outcomes in Graduation programs, especially for children under the age of five. While Graduation Approach interventions might boost the ability of households to invest in child nutrition due to livelihood development and consumption support, they might also produce unintended consequences with respect to mothers’ time use and intra-household decision-making. Each activity provides information on how their programming focuses on nutrition to achieve the outcomes detailed in Part Two.
Graduating to Resilience regularly monitors a number of nutrition indicators such as dietary diversity, exclusive breastfeeding, minimum acceptable diet, and stunting. Households work with coaches to learn meal planning, balanced diet, cooking demos, and kitchen gardens. Finally, this Activity succeeded in reducing stunting from 35% to 27%, and it was due to layering with the Village Health Teams to support nutrition screening and implementing a comprehensive referral system for nutrition services for underweight women and children (for more information on layering, see Part One).
Nobo Jatra shared lessons for layering interventions with the Government of Bangladesh (GOB). To do this, Nobo Jatra promotes attendance at GOB monthly growth monitoring and promotion sessions, which are open to all children under the age of five. These sessions are then complemented with additional nutrition counselling through household visits, voice messages, and referrals to basic health services offered through local community structures. Additionally, Nobo Jatra promotes kitchen gardens and climate smart agriculture, and it facilitates linkages with local service providers to access quality inputs (seeds) and animal health services. The promising food security and nutrition findings of the Nobo Jatra activity, as detailed in Part Two of the series, indicate this activity serves as a critical example for successful layering with government entities to reach food security and nutrition goals.
Livelihoods for Resilience promotes perma-gardening and provides poultry vouchers to improve dietary diversity. One particular lesson learned was the importance of combining perma-gardening training with access to quality seeds by working with agro-dealers. While perma-gardening methodologies increase yield in arid regions, households adopting these practices also require access to agro-dealers selling quality seeds in small, affordable packages for optimal results and greater yield.
Private Sector Engagement
Creating linkages with the private sector to consult, strategize, align, collaborate, and implement has proven important for greater scale, sustainability, and effectiveness of development or humanitarian outcomes. Private sector engagement (PSE) is a key element of the Graduation Approach, and the three activities found that successful PSE should be:
- Intentionally aligned with market demands and participant needs
- Established early
- Continued throughout the life of the activity
- Phased out gradually so households have the knowledge and resources needed to remain out of ultra-poverty
Graduating to Resilience: 1) Partnered with private sector entities to ensure financial inclusion and access to financial services after the first year of Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLA) operation. 2) Engaged the private sector to provide quality, affordable agricultural inputs to participants, including drought-resistant seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and animal medicines. 3) Held a Market Event that connected larger buyers with small-holder farmers, allowing farmers to circumvent middlemen and sell directly to larger buyers, thus increasing profits. 4) Connected participants to a private sector partner who would offer loans for cell phones, thus ensuring all participants have access to market information disseminated through SMS, voice messaging, and the mobile savings group app.
Nobo Jatra: 1) Uses private sector linkages for financial inclusion and access to financial services. Once VSLAs have an understanding of savings, loans, and the overall VSLA operation, Nobo Jatra establishes linkages to banks, thereby giving participants access to financial services as well as products, savings deposit schemes, and agent banking services tailored to the needs of the rural poor. Additionally, Nobo Jatra partners with a national bank that trains village agents to work with VSLAs to access financial services through the bank. 2) Emphasizes inclusive market systems development through partnerships with the private sector. Nobo Jatra also partners with private sector actors to improve health and nutrition behaviors. For example, Nobo Jatra developed a partnership with Advanced Chemical Industries, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Bangladesh, to train village agents on health and hygiene awareness, product knowledge, and basic business skills. Then, these agents provide messaging and sell products at the village level. 3) Has partnered with DreamStart Labs, which has designed DreamSave, an award-winning digital savings management application solution focused on group management, recordkeeping, and financial management for VSLAs. Under this partnership, DreamStart Labs is facilitating technical capacity building for VSLA group members and village agents.
Livelihoods for Resilience: 1) Links participants to existing Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) for sustainable access to financial service providers and provides capacity strengthening support to private MFIs to enable them to expand in underserved areas. 2) Emphasizes inclusive market systems and uses an innovation fund to establish or strengthen the last mile service and input providers in remote communities where the activity is implemented: agro dealers (who sell animal feed, tools, and high quality seeds), bee colony multiplication centers, feed franchisees linked to larger feed manufacturing company, and pullet (young chicken) growers.
Gender and Social Norms
Each activity views equitable gender and social norms as essential to a household’s pathway to self-reliance and resilience, thus the focus on gender equitable norms in the household, such as food distribution, workload, supporting environment, and decision-making in various ways. In this section, I will detail the lessons from each activity to align with Theme 6 of the Learning Agenda — Access and Inclusion: Women’s Empowerment.
Graduating to Resilience uses a Woman+ HH approach, whereby the woman is the primary participant and point of entry to the household. However, all household members are actively engaged in the activity from the creation of the household plan, participating in coaching, making decisions on livelihoods, and how to spend the asset transfer. Additionally, targeted gender equity messages are incorporated into the coaching curriculum to work with households on topics related to decision-making, gender inequalities, household responsibilities, and conflict management. Graduating to Resilience has a strong gender mainstreaming component, inclusive of annual gender and protection from sexual exploitation and abuse trainings for all staff (including front-line coaches and community-based trainers). The activity carried out a thorough gender analysis prior to implementation to best adapt interventions to promote equitable gender dynamics. Finally, Graduating to Resilience has a dedicated gender team to monitor these aspects and address any gender-related challenges that arise during implementation.
Nobo Jatra layers with other Nobo Jatra programs that promote gender equality and male engagement targeting activity husbands and wives. This approach helped minimize unintended negative consequences related to women participating in the activity, increased shared decision-making, and helped to reduce instances of child marriage. For example, a 2020 Graduation Assessment found that 86.3% of respondents have the correct knowledge about the minimum legal age of marriage for boys (21) and girls (18). This is remarkable, as the Nobo Jatra baseline data in 2016 found that the mean age of marriage was 15.2. (For more information on layering, read Part One).
Livelihoods for Resilience believes social norms and gender norms to be part of the enabling environment because they extend beyond the individual household, yet affecting households’ resilience. Livelihoods for Resilience uses an approach called Social Analysis and Action to identify and challenge gender norms related to women’s engagement in livelihoods and men’s roles in the home related to child care and food preparation, among others. This activity also implements a variety of interventions designed to build women’s and youth’s agency (including life skills and leadership training, an emphasis on women in leadership of VESA, and child care promotion).
Summary
As outlined in the USAID Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) framework, CLA occurs at the intersection of 1) partners, government officials, organizations, and other stakeholders collaborating at the right time to promote synergy; 2) generating, capturing, and sharing knowledge, ideas, and information; and 3) using that information to make better decisions, adjust accordingly, be more effective, replicate or scale up promising results, and/or avoid repeating unsuccessful approaches.
I am so excited to share the lessons learned from these three activities, as they demonstrate CLA in action. The three activities came together to share their lessons learned and expand the broader evidence on what is working and how to make better decisions when implementing the Graduation Approach, related to four critical topics: participatory approaches to targeting, achieving nutrition outcomes, engaging the private sector, and addressing gender and social norms.
We hope you will find this information useful when designing or implementing your next program! If you would like to learn more about applying the Ultra-Poor Graduation Approach in your own programming, feel free to reach out to the author of this blog series, Andie Procopio, Senior Researcher and Learning Advisor at IMPAQ International, or Gitau Mbure, Food Security Advisor at Mercy Corps.
What’s Next in the Series?
Join us next for the final part of this series: Adapting to COVID-19. We will discuss conducting context assessments, modifying savings groups, increased or adapted market interventions and private sector engagement, and remote implementation (Part Four).
ICYMI:
- What is the Graduation Approach and how did these three activities adapt to their contexts? (Part One)
- Promising outcomes from the three activities (Part Two)
Join us next week as we share our final post, Part Four: Adapting to COVID-19!
