Scaling Sustainable Poverty Graduation

In 2019, nearly 700 million people lived in extreme poverty, including 6.6 million in Rwanda alone. Given economic downturns driven by the global pandemic and other shocks, progress against extreme poverty has significantly stalled in recent years. However, the poverty graduation model has emerged as an approach to sustainably move people out of extreme poverty, having been proven to deliver lasting, meaningful effects on households' economic outcomes across a variety of contexts. Under the graduation model, households receive a package of core interventions, including skills training, mentorship, access to financial services, and seed capital and other assets to create sustainable businesses and savings groups. Village Enterprise developed a streamlined, low-cost version of the graduation model that has been rigorously tested in three randomized controlled trials. It was found to increase monthly household consumption and assets up to three and a half years after households entered the program. With $1.3 million and co-funding from Fund for Innovation in Development (FID), Village Enterprise is partnering with the Government of Rwanda to implement a wide-scale pilot of its poverty graduation program with 18,000 Rwandan households and train government staff to lead implementation of a pilot program with an additional 12,000 households. Under this award, Village Enterprise is working with the Government of Rwanda to raise an additional $15 million to support the government's nationwide adoption and scaling of a graduation program rooted in Village Enterprise's approach, intending to move more than one million Rwandans out of extreme poverty by 2028 and with the ultimate goal of ending extreme poverty. Photo: June 2024, Mbogo Sector, Rulindo, Rwanda. All three women of the Duhuzimbaraga Business Group are in their shop, selling various items. The women are: Veneranda Muhawenimana (43), Aline Niyorukundo (23), and Josiane Tuyisabe (20).