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Graduation programmes aim to provide a sequenced and intensive package of support to very poor people, with the objective of facilitating their movement out of extreme poverty towards resilient and sustainable livelihoods. The package usually includes regular cash transfers, productive assets, access to savings facilities, livelihood training and coaching. The success of first generation 'graduation model' programmes in Bangladesh has prompted pilot projects in several countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. This Editorial Introduction reviews alternative conceptualisations of graduation, summarises the evidence on impacts from several project evaluations presented in this IDS Bulletin, and discusses key aspects of design and implementation, including targeting, monitoring, 'asset-ness', labour market linkages and the nature of political support for graduation. The editors conclude that graduation programmes are an important and valuable contribution to development policy, but they should not displace the core social protection functions of social assistance and social insurance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rwanda demonstrates how a process of community consultation and participation is able to identify and rank community members according to 'social poverty', drawing on the Ubudehe tradition which is considered a strength of Rwanda's social fabric. However, with the Ubudehe categorisation now the basis for determining eligibility to a range of social benefits, the process has come under some strain. This article highlights two issues related to targeting and graduation: (1) the difficulty in identifying the poor/non-poor and ranking the population using community participatory techniques; and (2) the sensitivity of eligibility criteria and graduation thresholds to different targeting modalities. Our primary interest is to establish whether improvements for identifying the poor and non-poor can be made without undermining community ownership and what these improvements would look like. This will be useful for policymakers in Rwanda as the new five-year development strategy places importance on graduating households out of extreme poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chars Livelihoods Programme (CLP) in Bangladesh aims to lift households out of extreme poverty by providing a comprehensive package of support. As with other poverty reduction programmes in Bangladesh, CLP's success is partly judged using the concept of graduation. Defining graduation and how to actually measure it has generated significant debate. This article, prepared by members of the team responsible for implementing the programme, explains how CLP's thinking in terms of defining and measuring graduation has evolved over time. The programme finally arrived at an agreed set of graduation criteria and a measurement methodology in early 2014. This article presents graduation rates. It goes on to outline the factors that constrain and enable graduation and offers a set of conclusions and lessons learned, including the need to ensure alignment between programme design, operations and graduation criteria; and ensuring that sustainability of impacts/graduation is monitored and evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The total eradication of extreme poverty is a primary focus of the post-Millennium Development Goal (MDG) agenda. Whilst the term 'graduation' is contentious, in this article it is used to refer to the transition of households or individuals out of extreme poverty. Graduation programmes commonly focus on asset transfer to establish a productive micro-enterprise. To operationalise a 100 per cent graduation creates an imperative for programmes to focus on all of their beneficiaries, in particular the very poorest. The combination of smartphones and internet connectivity provides the building blocks of a system that can track the current status of all programme participants and provide frequent and up-to-date census-level information, enabling timely adaptation of interventions. EEP/Shiree, an extreme poverty reduction programme in Bangladesh, has adopted this approach. This article provides evidence from the roll-out of this system and its potential contribution to the practical realisation of the 'leave no one behind' objective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade social cash transfer programmes have become extremely popular in sub-Saharan Africa, and are often portrayed as an instrument that can facilitate graduation out of poverty. The evidence on whether social cash transfers have had actual effects on graduation, however, is limited. This article provides a cross-country reflection of the potential effects of social cash transfers on graduation, drawing from impact evaluation results of cash transfer programmes in Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho and Zambia. We analyse whether social cash transfers have improved the likelihood of graduation, through increased productivity, income generation and resilience to shocks. We identify which factors in terms of programme implementation and household characteristics can increase the likelihood of cash transfer programmes facilitating graduation from poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]