Ideas in Development: How BRAC partners with governments to fight poverty

And in terms of your own route to working on this, you were previously at Oxford Policy Management, where I imagine you had insight into the various government's attempts to implement social protection programs.

What, what were some of the things that you would see going wrong in those attempts?

Yeah, I think this is a very interesting question, because first of all, just to say, there are lots of really great social assistance and social protection programs out there.

But one of the things that I kept on seeing is that a lot of these programs weren't designed from the beginning to be run and implemented by governments.

So they were often designed by highly highly financed PMUs where civil servants would get top-up salaries in order to participate, or they would be implemented by highly paid development organizations who would be running those, often with experts.

And often universities from the US or the UK would be providing fancy methodology around indices to trigger various things.

And when it came to scale up or hand over to government, a lot of this fell apart, right? And why, in my mind, a lot of this happened because it wasn't designed bearing in mind what type of staff government would be able to afford and attract to run these programs, right? It was designed to meet sort of donor log frames and scoring.

And afterwards, when things were handed over to government, they often needed to be almost redesigned, right? And I found that quite frustrating after a while, to be honest.

And the other thing that attracted me to RUC is that I did a lot of work supporting governments in developing social protection policies.

And the idea of graduation programs where you provide a bigger investment into households for a specific period of time is something that a lot of governments are really interested in doing, but also really struggle to think through how to do well themselves, right? So there's this global evidence.

It is very attractive as an instrument within your social protection strategy, but a lot of the governments really struggle to understand, A, what it is.

It's not just about getting people off cash transfers, but B, also, even if they understood what it is, how to then make it work within the existing resources.

So both of this then led me to join BRAC and try to support governments in thinking through how to do this more effectively.

Yeah, and your approach at BRAC, as I understand it, you already kind of mentioned some of these ingredients of the graduation program, right? And at BRAC, instead of kind of holding all of those ingredients constant across the various countries you work in, you try to hold the impact you're aiming for constant and then adjust the design around that based on kind of the local context and what works in a given setting.

Could you walk us through how exactly that works in practice?

Yeah, maybe I can start by just explaining one thing about the model itself that I think not all of your listeners might know.

Graduation programs are all about changing outcomes for the participants.

So unlike a lot of programs that we deliver, especially that governments deliver, where there is a tendency to count what you are delivering, graduation programs are defined by whether households at the end of the programming period have hit certain indicators of success, right? And these typically map onto the multidimensional poverty that we discussed at the beginning and the many barriers that the program is set to tackle.

And only if participants' lives have changed across all of these dimensions is the program a success.

So when When I say things like trying to hold the impact of the model constant, that's what I mean, right? We need to make sure that the program still delivers that type of impact, right? But what we did, we and others did at first, is to focus a lot on tailoring the program technically to another context, right? So some of the barriers that the program was designed to tackle in Bangladesh are not relevant in other countries in the world that we're working with, right? But there will be other things like, for example, in South Africa where we work, there's a big issue of GBV and so on and violence that needs to be tackled.

But some of the things that the program in Bangladesh tackled are less relevant.

So the social exclusion being an example of this.

So a lot of the time initially when people were supporting adaptation globally, they focused on this technical adaptation.

What we are now trying to do is basically building on something that also Imago and others have been making popular in their book, Scaling Up Development Impact, which is the strategic triangle that says in order for an intervention to scale, you need to really do three things.

Firstly, of course, you need to technically tailor it, right? It needs to work within the context.