From Extreme Poverty to Sustainable Livelihoods: A Technical Guide to the Graduation Approach, Second Edition

This Technical Guide provides a roadmap for those wishing to implement programs based on the graduation approach—an integrated, carefully sequenced, multi-dimensional intervention to address extreme poverty. While the Guide will be useful for all graduation implementers, it is especially aimed at government policymakers and social protection agencies that operate at nationwide scale and are seeking to incorporate the graduation approach (or elements of it) into their programs.

This Guide draws on the lessons learned from multiple sources: the BRAC experience beginning in 2002 with Targeting the Ultra Poor (TUP), a program reaching more than half a million households in Bangladesh; a subsequent eight-year (2006-2014) global program involving 10 sites in eight countries; scale-ups of some of those programs; and new adaptations of the approach by governments and donor agencies.

The contributions of the graduation community of practice form the majority of the revisions to the Guide’s contents.