The Ultra-Poor Graduation (UPG) program is one of the most effective and rigorously evaluated anti-poverty interventions used by governments and implementers to date. Village Enterprise has over 30 years of experience implementing the UPG model in East Africa, supporting people in building sustainable businesses and moving out of extreme poverty. Following efforts to innovate and scale, Village Enterprise and IPA partnered on strengthening their MEL system, and as part of these efforts IPA developed a cost-effectiveness decision framework to help Village Enterprise sharpen their approach to UPG cost-effectiveness analysis.

Cost-effectiveness analysis can only support good portfolio decisions and meaningful comparisons across programs when the assumptions behind it are shared and transparent. Without that alignment, funders and implementers can reach very different conclusions about the same program, and comparisons across a diverse portfolio of partners and approaches break down. This is the gap this webinar aimed to address.

On June 23, 2026, IPA, Village Enterprise, and HereWeGrow hosted a webinar for implementing organizations and funders seeking to increase transparency and comparability in cost-effectiveness measurement. During the webinar, Andrés Parrado (Associate Director, Right-Fit Evidence, IPA), Rebecca Hémono (Head of Research, Village Enterprise), and Sarah Wiegel (MEL Manager, HereWeGrow) presented shared work on a cost-effectiveness decision framework to clarify general assumptions in cost-effectiveness analysis and present an applied example of how the work was used to facilitate conversations between implementing organizations and donors related to cost-effectiveness analysis. The panel brought a funder's view of the process, including how cost-effectiveness thinking feeds into partner selection, forecasting, and evaluation of SROI, and what that means for portfolio decisions and comparability across programs. The panelists ended the discussion with an open Q&A session.

Watch the webinar recording below: