Plenary presentations, including the main topic framing and the three country cases: (see full agenda)
The Forum opened with high-level representatives from the World Bank and Government of Rwanda setting the stage for rich discussion on economic inclusion. This session featured a presentation on Rwanda’s approach to economic inclusion, centered around its national graduation strategy, “Gira Wigire” (“to have dignity" in Kinyarwanda). This strategy places economic inclusion and jobs for the poor as the center of the country’s development agenda. The Vision Umurenge Program (VUP)—the country’s flagship safety net program, is a key tool in this approach. It aligns with the widely tested and proven graduation model while adapting to Rwanda’s local context and cultural traditions of community support and self-sufficiency. The representative from Rwanda shared key features and strengths of their approach, underscoring well-coordinated, holistic interventions. Reflections on the lessons learned offered valuable insights for all participants.
A Ladder of Opportunity Unlocking Jobs for the Poor | Download Presentation
This session presented an overview of the economic inclusion programs and their role in unlocking the productive potential of the poorest. It emphasized how these programs can generate job opportunities, particularly for women and youth, through coordinated, multidimensional interventions. The session discussed the effectiveness of these programs, their current reach, and the ambitious goal set by the World Bank to reach 500 million people with social protection programs by 2030. Finally, it outlined the next steps required to scale these programs, including government commitment and collaboration with partners, including NGOs, community-based organizations, and the private sector.
What Works? Evidence for Scaling up with Impact | Download Presentation
Evidence from economic inclusion programs implemented in diverse contexts shows that these multifaceted programs improve the lives of poor and vulnerable people, including by increasing income, assets, and consumption. While most of the early evidence came from small-scale initiatives led by nongovernmental organizations, recent evaluations of government programs are also showing promising results. This session examined the impact of three government programs that have evaluated their economic inclusion interventions. The focus was on understanding the effectiveness of these interventions, operational innovations, and lessons for scaling up in a cost-effective manner to enhance economic well-being and resilience.
This program piloted a livelihood package provided as part of its National Social Safety Nets Program. This intervention led to significant increases in household profits, earnings, consumption, and resilience, demonstrating the positive impact of combining cash transfers with livelihood support to enhance economic well-being and household resilience. The impact evaluation of this program also included some interesting operational innovations, including testing whether letting households decide which member would receive the livelihood package improved outcomes. Results from the evaluation highlight how empowering households to make productive investment decisions can lead to better economic outcomes.
Senegal's Yokk Koom Koom (YKK) program under the Adaptive Safety Net project has shown significant positive impacts, including increases in business revenues and profits, as well as improved measures of psychosocial well-being. Success factors include strong partnerships, innovative support methods, localized content, and community involvement. The program provides valuable lessons on scaling up economic inclusion programs in both urban and rural settings through government systems.
The Supporting Women's Livelihood program under the Girls’ Education and Women's Empowerment and Livelihoods for Human Capital Project in Zambia illustrates how multifaceted economic inclusion programs can deliver impact at scale through government systems and community structures while supporting women's economic empowerment. The program significantly increased household consumption, business profits, savings, and assets, with these gains sustained three years after implementation. The program's impact evaluations also offer insights into the varying effects of different economic inclusion packages.
Designing for Impact: Programmatic Adaptations to Scale | Download Presentation
The drive to scale in the face of increasing poverty is a hallmark of economic inclusion and the strongest programs design for scale from the start. They feature flexible program design, use data to make adjustments and improve quality, and rely on diagnostics to expand to serve new populations and geographies. This session featured three country case studies that described the adaptations they have made to program design in order to serve new population groups, move into new geographies, or to scale up a pilot program. Panelists discussed what information, diagnostics, or tools enabled them to adjust program design to scale up.
Ghana's productive inclusion program, the Complementary Livelihood and Assets Support Scheme under the Ghana Productive Safety Net Project 2 project, is designed to provide a graduation pathway within its social protection landscape and help extremely poor households work their way out of poverty. The program began with a pilot project in rural areas and plans to scale to 60,000 beneficiaries. Its scale strategy includes expanding geographically to new districts and communities and initiating an urban project. The program will also increase outreach to women and people with disabilities while implementing program improvements.
Madagascar's social safety net program has expanded to include economic inclusion components. Initially, the government prioritized rural areas due to high poverty rates and budget limitations but later expanded to urban areas to address COVID-19's economic impacts. Following solid results from rural and urban pilots, including a study comparing cash-only and multidimensional programs, the government is expanding from 14 to 23 regions with a program that combines productive and financial inclusion elements.
The Supérate ("improve yourself") Program financed by the Integrated Social Protection Inclusion and Resilience Project (INSPIRE) has emerged as the main mechanism to combat poverty in the Dominican Republic and evolved from a care approach to one based on capacity building and continuous support for households in vulnerable conditions. Critical changes were made to program delivery to ensure improved outcomes, including linking a universal social registry with climate shock vulnerability indices. Most importantly, individual participant goals are strategically integrated to create a trajectory linking components and activities to help them achieve their vision.
Implementing the Vision: Program Delivery at Scale & Policy Integration | Download Presentation
This session highlighted the institutional dimensions of scaling up economic inclusion programs and examined diverse arrangements for achieving scale, considering operational and organizational challenges. Many governments implement economic inclusion components through partnerships—with NGOs or other ministries—while others build programs using community structures to strengthen local buy-in and reduce costs. Coordination challenges must be addressed for effective scaling up, and all programs must consider scaling implications when designing institutional arrangements. Representatives from three countries implementing economic inclusion programs discussed their efforts to institutionalize economic inclusion within their systems and shared emerging best practices for implementation at scale.
Cameroon's Adaptive Safety Nets and Economic Inclusion Project seeks to increase urban youth's access to income-generation and entrepreneurship support opportunities and provides a strong example of interinstitutional coordination. Employment promotion is recognized as a cross-cutting issue in Cameroon involving multiple public and private actors, making effective coordination a key objective. The Ministry of Employment and Vocational Training leads the project, collaborating with ministries of Education and Small and Medium Enterprises to leverage their expertise. This collaboration ensures a more comprehensive and effective approach to addressing constraints faced by urban youth.
The Kenya Social and Economic Inclusion Program was implemented from 2020-2024 as an effort to move beyond cash transfers. Initially, the program was implemented by NGOs in close collaboration with the government to build capacity and establish workflows and systems. Now in its second cohort (2024-2025), the government is leading implementation with minimal backstopping support from NGOs. The program is planning to scale up from five counties in the original project to twenty-five counties while refining and strengthening systems to support this growth.
India's National Rural Livelihood Program has enabled over 100 million people to establish sustainable livelihoods, build their savings, and join community-based institutions. As part of this initiative, state Rural Livelihood Missions developed special projects for extremely vulnerable households by utilizing the graduation approach to ensure the inclusion of the most marginalized in the self-help group movement. This program will scale up across 11 states.
Realizing Potential: Boosting Youth Employment | Download Presentation
With over 65 million young people unemployed worldwide, creating jobs for youth is an economic and social priority for governments. Economic inclusion programs specifically designed to address youth unemployment have shown promising results in improving access to income through self-employment and wage opportunities. These programs serve as testing grounds for innovative approaches to tackle employment challenges and integrate young people into the economy across different contexts. This session explored how economic inclusion programs address youth unemployment through hands-on learning, digital tools, and tailored solutions for vulnerable youth.
The Kenya Youth Employment and Opportunities Project (KYEOP) and the National Youth Opportunities Towards Advancement (NYOTA) project in Kenya aim to increase employment and earning opportunities for Kenyan youth. The newly launched NYOTA program builds on the success of KYEOP and provides technical and soft skills training, productive grants, savings support, childcare services, labor intermediation services, and apprenticeships, with the goal of creating job opportunities for vulnerable youth, including women, forcibly displaced youth, and people with disabilities. The program offers insights on how to scale up youth employment initiatives on a national level.
The Recovery and Advancement of Informal Sector Employment (RAISE) project in Bangladesh aims to improve young micro-entrepreneurs' productivity and provide income-earning opportunities for low-income urban youth and those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The program provides tailored interventions, including technical and life skills training, apprenticeships, stipends, and access to microcredit. It also leverages digital tools to facilitate program delivery and engage young people in diverse livelihoods.
The National Employment Program under the Support to Private Sector Employment and Skills Project for Jordan aims to address high youth unemployment rates in Jordan by providing wage employment linkages, skills training, and cash transfers to poor and vulnerable youth. The program is expanding support through referrals to microcredit and digital tools to enhance program delivery. It offers insights on engaging the private sector to create suitable jobs for youth and boost female labor force participation.
The Climate Poverty Nexus: Building Resilience in a Changing World | Download Presentation
Climate change threatens to push 122 million people into extreme poverty by 2030. Governments worldwide are at a critical juncture in reimagining social protection and labor programs to effectively address the impacts of climate change. Within the array of social protection responses, economic inclusion programs provide a promising pathway for fostering sustainable livelihoods among the most vulnerable. Flexible and multisectoral in design, these programs aim to increase incomes and assets while diversifying livelihoods to enhance climate resilience. This session highlighted innovative efforts from three countries at different stages of integrating climate resilience into their economic inclusion programs.
Building on lessons from previous government programs, the Social Support for Resilient Livelihoods Project (SSRLP) strengthens resilience to climate shocks through livelihood support, climate-smart public works, and emergency cash transfers. The project promotes diversified income opportunities—both on-farm and off-farm—by building household assets, enhancing risk management, and facilitating a transition to more productive activities.
Ethiopia’s Rural Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), one of the largest social protection initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa, includes a public works component that provides employment for food-insecure farmers during the agricultural off-season. This component has successfully integrated activities such as tree planting and soil and water conservation to mitigate climate-related risks and food insecurity. Additionally, the program offers complementary livelihood services, including economic inclusion initiatives, to help PSNP beneficiaries enhance and diversify their incomes.
Indonesia's PENA (Indonesian Economic Heroes) program, designed to build the capacity of poor beneficiaries—primarily women—provides training, mentoring, and business grants to support the creation of sustainable enterprises and startups. This economic inclusion program seeks to promote entrepreneurship that generates economic and social benefits. There is an opportunity to strengthen the program by integrating climate resilience interventions. By doing so, the PENA program can enhance its economic and social impacts while further contributing to environmental sustainability.
Engendering Equality: Women’s Economic Empowerment | Download Presentation
Economic inclusion programs have a strong track record in promoting women's economic empowerment (WEE) across multiple domains, including income generation, savings accumulation, and agency. While 90 percent of economic inclusion programs target women, only a third have WEE as a core objective. Including deliberate strategies to address gender inequality in program design can enable women to overcome barriers and social norms in their communities. This session featured three case studies of interventions that promote livelihoods, engage men to shift mindsets, and reduce gender-based violence. The session also addressed challenges in shifting social norms and reducing women's unequal care burden.
The Productive Social Safety Net (PSSN) program in Tanzania aims to empower women and enhance their human capital outcomes through livelihood interventions, savings support, and raising awareness on gender-based violence. The program led to a positive impact on women’s empowerment, including an increase in ownership of resources and decision-making power, and a favorable shift in gender roles in the community. The impact and lessons learned are informing the design of the second phase of the program to ensure a stronger focus on reducing gender inequality.
The Khud Mukhtar program under the Punjab Human Capital Investment Project aims to address poverty through asset accumulation and sustainable livelihoods with a focus on women’s empowerment in Punjab, Pakistan. The program engages couples as joint participants and provides a productive asset, labor market readiness training, mentorship, and coaching. The program empowered women by increasing their asset ownership and raising awareness of gender inequality in the broader community.
The FORSA pilot under the Strengthening Social Safety Net Project in Egypt provided recipients of the Takaful cash transfer program with behavior change training and support for self-employment and wage employment. The pilot primarily targeted women and provided them with income-generating activities such as livestock management, manufacturing and agricultural sectors. The pilot led to increased women's economic empowerment and contributed to national efforts to combat gender-based violence.
Harvesting Solutions: Food and Nutrition Security | Download Presentation
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, global food insecurity has more than doubled. This trend is likely to continue as economic crises, conflicts, and climate change threaten food systems and livelihoods, disproportionately affecting poor and vulnerable people. Economic inclusion programs can improve food and nutrition security through multiple pathways: cash transfers address immediate needs, while productive grants, skills training, and coaching can increase incomes and promote behavioral changes to sustain food and nutrition security. This session explored how three economic inclusion programs improved food and nutrition security through innovations in agricultural and food systems and program adaptations in fragile and climate-vulnerable settings.
The Community Livelihood and Agriculture Support (CLAS) program under the Recovery of Economic Activity for Liberian Informal Sector Employment (REALISE) Project aims to improve livelihood opportunities and resilience among poor and food-insecure households in rural, climate-vulnerable areas of Liberia. The program provides tailored interventions, including agricultural inputs, grants, climate-smart agricultural training, and market linkages for farmers to transform food systems. The program's positive impact on food security and lessons learned have informed the next phase's design, which includes a strong focus on addressing nutrition gaps.
Building on the success of the globally recognized Bolsa Família cash transfer program, Brazil's government recently launched the Acredita program, which targets vulnerable women with children and marginalized households. The program provides training, access to livelihood opportunities, and cash transfers to boost income and resilience. The program provides insights on how to leverage women’s economic empowerment as pathway to improve food and nutrition security.
With support from Emergency Social Protection Enhancement and COVID-19 Response Project, Yemen's Social Fund for Development (SFD) adopts a holistic approach to address poverty through inclusive growth and sustainable development across multiple sectors. By integrating interventions in entrepreneurship, skills development, microcredit, and nutrition behavior, SFD helps poor and vulnerable households improve their food access and nutrition outcomes. The programs demonstrate how cross-sector integration can address vulnerable households' multidimensional needs in conflict settings.
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