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...
Five things we learnt about poverty dynamics in world’s fourth most populous country
I recently had the pleasure of working with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Indonesian Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) on a year-long project on poverty and child well-being, writes Bjorn Gelders. It was a productive collaboration: we ran a series of technical workshops with statisticians; crunched data...
Third strike and you’re out? PMT performance against financial diaries and wealth-ranking data
What do you do when your most important poverty measurement tool on a poverty outreach programme looks as if it is not working? Guest blogger Julie Lawson-McDowall writes. Not so long ago, we at CRS’s Expanding Financial Inclusion (EFI) project (https://efiafrica.crs.org ) had a bit of a moment: it looked as...
Poor targeting: a response to Pathways’ paper on how best to reach those in poverty
Nicholas Freeland Sometimes in life there are things that you know, instinctively, to be true; but you lack the proof with which to convince others. It is then particularly gratifying when the necessary proof emerges. I have experienced just such a moment of gratification with the appearance of Development Pathways’...