The number of people living in extreme poverty continues to be alarming and disheartening. The World Bank estimates that around one person in 10, or 700 million people, live in extreme poverty —a number that will likely increase due to ongoing threats of climate change, conflict, and inequality. Yet, in face of these grim numbers, there are proven solutions and promising partnerships that provide hope for a future free of extreme poverty.
BRAC and the World Bank facilitated a recent visit between the Government of Bihar, India and the Government of Ethiopia for the governments to exchange learning on adapting and scaling BRAC’s Graduation approach. This sequenced, adaptive approach provides participants experiencing extreme poverty with support to meet basic needs; a productive asset to support income-generating activities; and coaching to unlock agency, know-how, and hope. Rigorous evidence from dozens of contexts suggests that this kind of “big push” approach could enable hundreds of millions to escape poverty, empower families, and create lasting benefits for future generations.
The Graduation approach was founded in 2002 in Bangladesh and has evolved into a globally-adopted program with over 100 programs in nearly 50 countries implemented by civil society actors, development partners, and governments.
The State of Bihar in India is home to the world’s largest government-led Graduation program, JEEViKA’s Satat Jeevikoparjan Yojana (SJY), which has reached more than 185,000 households – nearly 1 million people – to date, with plans to reach millions more. The program exemplifies how governments can scale evidence-based innovations, and many are eager to learn how to adapt and scale the Graduation approach in their own contexts. To promote South-South government exchange around JEEViKA’s program, BRAC partnered with the Government of Bihar to launch the Immersion and Learning Exchange Program and host governments and partners to drive cross-learning.
Recently, a government delegation from Ethiopia visited and held rich discussions with the Bihar government, SJY implementing staff, program participants, and community members. The visit showcased the unique potential of collaborating across governments, civil society, and multilateral institutions to prioritize those furthest behind.
Despite the regional and economic differences, one of the common challenges threatening sustainable poverty eradication globally is climate change. Both Bihar and Ethiopia are drought and flood-prone, and people in poverty are most impacted by these climate shocks time and time again. This reality highlighted the importance of inclusive social protection systems and livelihood programs that intentionally include and design for people in poverty.
This also highlighted the importance of investing in government systems that deliver long-term, transformative change for the furthest behind at scale as extreme weather events become more frequent and intense. If we are to truly achieve long-term impact and resilience for the poorest, governments must be supported by partners to develop and deliver such systems.
For many countries with large populations of extreme poverty, the World Bank is one of the few funding sources for scalable systems change, particularly IDA. IDA is a critical funding source that also offers great potential for cross-learning among partners, including between IDA-recipient and IDA donor countries. While India is currently an IDA donor, the country was formerly an IDA-recipient country like Ethiopia today. In fact, JEEViKA was originally a joint government-World Bank project and is now entirely government-run, showing the potential of World Bank investments to scale transformative impact and support government ownership.
Increased knowledge exchange can help incentivize wider uptake of evidence-based approaches like Graduation, encourage government ownership to achieve scale and sustainability, and strengthen existing efforts to reach millions more people, which is why it is a key objective of the recently launched Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty.
As the global community races to make progress on the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, we must work together to scale interventions that we already know deliver impact for those furthest behind. BRAC and the World Bank have been successfully collaborating for years—together with governments looking for effective solutions for their people.
As a steering committee member of the Partnership for Economic Inclusion (PEI) hosted at the World Bank, BRAC supports its global agenda of knowledge sharing, innovation, learning, and capacity strengthening for governments aiming to scale evidence-based interventions for people living in poverty. To accelerate knowledge sharing between governments further, BRAC and PEI are partnering to deliver a South-South Learning Forum later this year, co-hosted by the Government of Rwanda. The Forum will convene Global South policymakers and practitioners to exchange insights on barriers and opportunities to scaling effective government-led Graduation and economic inclusion programs.
Rasha Natour, Senior Specialist, Policy & Partnerships, BRAC’s Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative, wrote this story of partnership.
