Despite being one of the wealthiest areas in Ghana, pockets of extreme poverty persist in the Eastern Region. Undernourishment and food insecurity are a fact of life for many people. Most people farm a basic subsistence crop with little or no access to markets where they could sell their excess supply. Due to their remote locations, few government services reach the villages, ingraining their isolation from their neighbors and the broader Ghanaian community, and diminishing their access to pathways out of poverty.

The Hunger Project is working towards a solution to the cycle of poverty in Ghana through a large scaling up of their "epicenter strategy." THP is building "epicenters," which are a cluster of villages that work together to promote health, education, food security and economic development. THP will train animators from each village in activities such as literacy and pre-natal training, agricultural techniques and HIV awareness for each epicenter. THP encourages participants to be accountable for their villages' development and the epicenters are designed to be sustainable once THP support ends. In a majority of the epicenter villages, an epicenter building that will host health and pre-natal clinics, classrooms, a microfinance center, a library, and other facilities provides a physical center for the intervention. The villagers provide the labor and materials to build the buildings. The idea is that the initial stages of epicenter programming, construction is the unifying force that brings the communities together in the pursuit of a common goal.

THP plans to cover the entire Eastern Region, but it is neither feasible nor desirable to build all 112 epicenters at once. Instead, a lottery will be run within each district to determine which communities are offered an epicenter in the first or second phase, with each phase happening 4-5 years apart. This random allocation will allow IPA to determine the impact of the epicenter strategy. IPA's analysis will focus on the impact of the THP programs attempt across multiple areas: health, nutrition, income, the role of women, social cohesion, and education. The long-term nature of the evaluation will allow us to examine if the effects of epicenters are sustained over time and whether or not the epicenter strategy is financially sustainable.