What's the best way to help extremely poor people? After 20 years, the evidence is in.

[applegrove]

What’s the best way to help extremely poor people? After 20 years, the evidence is in.

Is it really useful to “teach a person to fish” or should you just give them the damn fish already?

By Sigal Samuel  Jun 24, 2022, 9:00am EDT

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23152657/poverty-cash-graduation-ultra-poor-brac

"SNIP......

Abed and his team decided they needed to try something new if they wanted to lastingly improve life for the worst-off — the “ultra-poor,” as they put it. So in the early 2000s, they went into village after village in Bangladesh, deliberately looked for the poorest people, and talked to them. And what they realized was that the ultra-poor aren’t only poor in terms of cash — they also lack knowledge about how to invest cash, lack confidence in themselves, and lack social ties to the broader community.

“We started realizing that it’s not going to be a simple sort of solution,” Abed said. “It’s going to have to be a package of things, because it has to address multiple vulnerabilities. So then there was this idea of a ‘big push’ investment.”

That “big push” is the idea that offering a combo of assets and training and cash — instead of just, say, cash — can trigger a virtuous cycle that ultimately helps ultra-poor people escape poverty. For example, you can offer people livestock plus training on how to make money off that livestock plus a bit of cash to sustain them while they get things up and running. This premise became the bedrock of what BRAC called the “ultra-poor graduation program,” which aims to “graduate” recipients out of extreme poverty.

BRAC

BRAC pioneered this program in 2002, at a time when some of the world’s top development economists — like the 2019 Nobel Prize winners Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo — were starting to champion a more scientific, evidence-based approach to figuring out what helps people in poverty. These economists decided to study the ultra-poor graduation program over many years to see its long-term effects. Because the graduation program in Bangladesh seemed to do a good job of lastingly increasing earnings, that model started spreading around the world. It’s currently in use in 50 countries, generating even more research aimed at evaluating the impacts.

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[XanaDUer2]

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[Maraya1969]

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