One in 20 people in Bangladesh live in extreme poverty. They face multifaceted challenges, such as access to basic services, but also emerging challenges such as rising living costs and climate impacts.
BRAC pioneered the Graduation approach in 2002, when we recognised that there was a subset of people who were living in situations of poverty so entrenched that they could not even benefit from microfinance. It has four pillars - livelihood promotion, financial inclusion, social mobilisation and social protection. Graduation approach unlocks potential through a holistic, time-bound and context-specific set of interventions over 12-36 months , which strengthens agency, restores dignity, and puts people on a pathway to self-reliance. 100% of the participants in Graduation cohorts are women, and 97% reported in 2023 that they had gained control over their income and family resources.
Graduation has long-term benefits - a randomised control trial by the London School of Economics found 95% of participants continued to improve their living standards when measured even eleven years after the programme ended. The approach has been implemented by BRAC in 17 countries across the world. It has now been adapted through partnerships with over 100 organisations across more than 50 countries.
Graduation Approach
Graduation approach is a holistic, climate-sensitive, context-specific, and time-bound and sequenced set of interventions over two years, that aims to enable extremely poor households to progress along a pathway to a sustainable livelihood, reduced inequality and socioeconomic resilience. It is based on four pillars, support people to earn money through livelihoods promotion and linking them with the market, show people how to save, spend wisely, and use digital money through financial inclusion, facilitating social protection by Connecting people to help from the government and other services when they need it, promoting social empowerment by promoting inclusion, behavioural change and life skills improvement. As part of the Poverty Alleviation Cluster, UPG shares a resilience pathway of Survive, Grow, Sustain, working alongside the Integrated Development Programme and the Integrated Climate Change Programme to strengthen internal synergy within BRAC and deepen impact at the community level.
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Graduation at a glance
2.4M
families have graduated out of extreme poverty in Bangladesh
9x
increase in savings among participants after the programme ends, plus a 37% increase in earnings.
93%
of participants sustain the benefits 10+ years after graduation
Graduation out of ultra poverty
Featured stories
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How to strengthen anti-poverty efforts by Shameran Abed
Even before the pandemic reversed progress in reducing extreme poverty, policies and programs largely failed to meet the needs of the poorest and most marginalized. Unless that failure is corrected, the most severe forms of poverty will remain entrenched long after the COVID-19 crisis ends.
Programs need to reach people in the most extreme states of poverty, must empower people living in extreme poverty to build long-term resilience, need to treat poverty as multifaceted and context-specific, and must engage local communities and governments. -Shameran Abed, Executive Director, BRAC International
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An approach to ending poverty that works
What sets the BRAC’s graduation approach apart from other attempts to reach the poorest is, in part, the mixed methods used. BRAC takes a multi-intervention approach.
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Upward mobility for the world’s destitute
The programme succeeded everywhere. Families ate more, were more certain about access to food, held more assets, had more income and savings, spent more time working, and enjoyed better mental and physical health. Women had more say in family decisions.
Our hard work slowly paid off. We became our community’s favorite vegetable vendor. Then, because there was also a demand for general household goods, we used the proceeds from the cart to open a small corner store… There were always new faces arriving in [our community], and the demand for fresh vegetables kept increasing.”
Shahinur
Ultra-Poor Graduation participant
