Introducing “The Contents – and Discontents – of Graduation”: Development Pathways blog series
Development Pathways today launches a blog series entitled The Contents – and Discontents – of Graduation in order to further debate the pros and cons of graduation strategies. Over the next six weeks, we will host a weekly blog from practitioners and academics; advocates and critics; government implementers and NGOs. There has...
Dangerous Habits of Thought: why I fear ‘graduation’ and ‘resilience’
Shivers ran down my spine when I interviewed an official in Bangladesh about social protection last week. We had a friendly discussion about, among other things, why the Government of Bangladesh has shown such strong commitment to social protection – including taking out a US$0.5 billion soft loan with the World...
Graduation into Social Protection: access to social assistance, not off of it, is critical for the ultrapoor
There are various ways for economic development programmes to define graduation—and it’s not always ‘out’ of a programme. While policymakers rightly consider whether and how to augment the sustainability of social protection programmes through a productive component (including graduation initiatives), it is also worth considering how some programmes are simply...
What is the Evidence on ‘Graduation’ Programmes?
How easy is it to ‘graduate’ people out of poverty? In recent years, there has been a wave of so-called ‘graduation’ programmes in developing countries, all of which are derived from BRAC’s Targeting the Ultra-Poor (TUP) programme in Bangladesh. Claims are made by these schemes of a high proportion of...
The Graduation Pilot in Ethiopia – The sought after dream of ‘sustainable livelihoods’
With a small number of 500 participants, REST tested the approach in Ethiopia as an effort to find pathways – not just out of extreme poverty – but out of what the state considers indefinite dependency on the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), one of the largest national safety nets in...
A recap: the contents, and discontents, of Graduation
Development Pathways launched a blog series entitled The Contents – and Discontents – of Graduation in order to further debate the pros and cons of graduation strategies. Over the last five weeks, we hosted a weekly blog from practitioners and academics; advocates and critics; government implementers and NGOs. Our five-week blog series...
Graduating Into — Not Out of — a National Social Security System
Graduation Programmes have gone a long way in helping many vulnerable families develop diversified sources of income, build up their assets and self-confidence, and be more resilient to shocks and...
The Misuse of the Term ‘Graduation’ in Social Policy
In our 14th Pathways Perspective, Stephen Kidd, Senior Social Policy Advisor, discusses why the term ‘graduation’ should be eliminated from international development discourse. The term ‘graduation’ conflates the two concepts...
Tackling exclusion, pensions progress, citizen action: a year in review
2017 has been a busy year for Development Pathways. We have redoubled our efforts to share the experience and knowledge we have gained working on building the strategies and systems needed to ensure evidence-led, inclusive programmes that realise human rights. Our most-read resources reflect the evidence we have provided on the...
The effectiveness of the graduation approach: what does the evidence tell us?
Stephen Kidd and Diloá Athias critically assess what the evidence tells us about the effectiveness of the Graduation approach.