Ultra Poor Graduation Pilots: Spanning the Gap Between Charity and Microfinance

This paper discusses the origin and impact of the Ultra Poor Graduation Program that BRAC, Bangladesh launched in 2002, when it noticed that ultra-poor households were not benefiting from its microfinance program. In 2006, CGAP and the Ford Foundation joined together to replicate the intervention in other countries along with a series of impact evaluations. Today, the Graduation Project has expanded to ten pilots in eight countries

The Ultra Poor Graduation Model recognizes that building livelihoods has the potential to help ultra-poor households escape extreme poverty, but food-insecure households need more than just financial services to diversify incomes and increase assets. Conclusions include:

• Graduation Model has the potential to pick up where microfinance has left off in helping households who are most in need;
• It takes a holistic approach to addressing extreme poverty by providing beneficiaries with productive assets and a comprehensive set of services including training in entrepreneurship, savings, and healthcare;
• It helps ultra poor households to become independent from long-term safety net services and graduate from extreme poverty;
• Rigorous evaluations in multiple country settings will help implementers and policymakers in understanding the precise impacts of the model.