Global Meeting on Reaching the Poorest - Learning from Different Approaches

After two intense days of learning and knowledge exchange among Graduation Program Pilot participants and researchers, the public part of the meeting (which I am attending) started out by a panel discussion on different approaches to reach the poorest. I learned a lot and will soon make the conference materials available, but here are some interesting snippets from some of the panelists.

Syed Hashemi discussed the graduation program, which is now being piloted by 9 organizations in 7 different countries. Hashemi is convinced that the poorest (the 1.3 billion people living below $1.25 a day) can graduate out of dire poverty, and some of the key features of any program attempting to do just that are: 1) intense monitoring of individuals and their households (through visits and coaching); 2) careful sequencing of services (consumption support, training, asset transfer, savings); and 3) a long-term commitment. If you want to learn more about the graduation program, stay tuned until tomorrow or check out this new community site.

Sybil Chidiac, from CARE's Access Africa program, discussed CARE's plans to expand its Village Savings and Loan methodology to millions of poor households in Africa. Building their savings capacity and group skills first is CARE's VSL hallmark approach to reaching very poor people and leaving them with self-managed groups to build long-term savings and support.

Chris Dunford discussed Freedom From Hunger's well known credit-with-education approach, which combines women's group lending with education. To me one of FFH's biggest strengths is its tradition of providing strong evidence of its approach and commitment to lifelong learning. And they don't keep the learning for themselves, just check out Freedom's  technical resources for a wealth of knowledge on microfinance and health for instance. Linking lending (and more recently also savings) group members to health products and health services is FFH's "secret ingredient" to poverty alleviation.

Plan International's Tjipke Bergsma had a lot of interesting things to say about PLAN's child-centered approach and he emphasized repeatedly that participation by youth (especially girls) is key to any long-term success of their programs. He also mentioned the importance of market development.

An important and perhaps somewhat surprising common theme mentioned by all panelists is that confidence building is extremely important when working witht the ultra poor, probably even more important than access to finance. What's more, one of the most visible and fairly quick outcomes of all these programs is indeed the increased confidence of participants.

As you can imagine, I am only scratching the surface of these programs and I can't possibly do justice to their immense learning. But I hope that I raised interest in a topic, economic strengthening of the ultra poor, that is finally getting the attention it needs.  And I invite anyone to share your thoughts or ask any questions. If you do so soon, I can even bring your questions directly to the many experts gathered here in Paris.

Wishing you a "bonne journee" from Paris.

Jan