The poorest, chronically food insecure households, with irregular incomes and little or no assets are often excluded from development interventions including microcredit. When they do receive assistance they are rarely able to improve their conditions enough to maintain long-term sustainable livelihoods. They are often chronically food insecure and more vulnerable to health shocks and natural calamities. They have generally failed to benefit from economic policies that have created growth and prosperity for the middle class. They remain socially marginalised and geographically situated in hard to reach areas. Many live in female headed households or are physically unable to work for a living. The great majority are excluded from most development interventions. And even when specific programmes target them, they fail to ensure sustainable livelihoods that can provide for food security beyond the duration of the programme.
Through years of work on poverty alleviation BRAC (the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) has developed an extremely successful ‘graduation model’. BRAC’s Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction – Targeting the Ultra Poor (CFPR-TUP) programme targets the poorest. It combines support for immediate consumption with an asset grant to kick start an economic activity and provides skills training, basic health care assistance and access to financial services. The model gives recipients a 24-month period to develop sustainable livelihoods and ‘graduate’ out of extreme poverty.
This report presents BRAC’s new model as a major innovation in our understanding of extreme poverty and demonstrates its success in combating many of the conventional ‘poverty traps’ and ‘graduating’ many of the poorest out of extreme poverty. But the report also show how the process of ‘graduation’ is fraught with challenges, how it is ultimately limited by meso-level constraints and how many will always require state level support.
