Abstract
Motivation
Many social protection programmes aspire to graduate poor people out of poverty. While some successfully ensure food security and survival for the poorest, few have moved large numbers of people sustainably out of poverty and into productive livelihood opportunities.
Purpose
This paper aims to understand better the challenges to sustainable graduation out of poverty; and why the graduation has been so difficult to achieve in many social protection programmes.
Approach and Methods
We define graduation and identify primary objectives related to food security and consumption and secondary aims for asset accumulation. We then apply this thinking to the case of the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia, drawing on evaluation spanning the first 10 years of the programme.
Findings
The programme has been successful on some fronts — such as saving lives, reducing distress sales and providing community‐level services — while on others, such as household asset building and livestock accumulation, it has failed to deliver. In this context we ask why the programme has underperformed in building household assets, and further, why, despite the lack of evidence on livelihood strengthening, the PSNP programme proceeded to prematurely graduate so many households.
It seems that PSNP was unable to graduate most households out of poverty, owing to lack of capacity to design and implement measures to raise incomes and to lack of opportunities to do so. Many households, however, were graduated out of PSNP, apparently because field staff had quotas to do so, whether or not the households had progressed out of poverty.
Policy implications
PSNP shows how a programme can succeed in its primary objective of alleviating deep poverty and preventing people from becoming destitute. But it also shows that to reach the more ambitious target of graduating households out of poverty, more funds and administrative capacity are needed to generate additional household economic activity. Investments in complementary rural services are needed as well.