Monday, June 29, 2026
9:00-10:00AM EDT
The Ultra-Poor Graduation (UPG) approach is a multi-component anti-poverty intervention that supports households to be able to weather and avoid shocks while finding a path towards sustainable livelihoods and resilience. It is one of the most well-researched and successful approaches for reducing poverty. Yet, very few studies have investigated its impact on young children (Roelen, Sherer & Himmelstine, 2024). Emerging evidence suggests that even highly effective household poverty alleviation programs might not improve outcomes for young children (Bouguen & Dillon, 2026).
Early childhood development represents an important set of outcomes in its own right, and is also critical for breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty. This webinar, hosted jointly by IPA's Education and Social Protection sectors, shares insights from a new wave of research, supported by the Gates Foundation and Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, investigating whether and how graduation programs can be designed to improve outcomes for young children.
Presentations from three research studies explore what happens with children in a standard graduation program, and what becomes possible when child-focused components are intentionally integrated into the UPG program model.
- Peter Rockers, Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health, will present evidence on the medium-term effects of AVSI Foundation’s UPG program on child development. Researchers visited host community households enrolled in the Graduating to Resilience study in Western Uganda six years after the introduction of the program and assessed children up to 9 years of age using measures of nutritional status, executive functioning, and school readiness. This study offers rare evidence on whether household economic gains from a standard graduation program accumulate into lasting benefits for children over time.
- Moritz Poll, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago’s Development Innovation Lab, and Hyun Soo Suh, Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at Washington University in St. Louis, will present results from Yamba Malawi’s child-focused ultra-poor graduation program that augments a standard graduation program with early childhood development (ECD) training. The intervention targets mothers with young children in a population that is both severely stunted and approximately 1 SD behind international benchmarks on child development. In an RCT of 1,872 households, they find that the intervention had positive effects on child’s cognitive skills within one year, with promising effects on schooling outcomes, but no significant effect on anthropometrics.
- Sarah Kabay, Education Program Director at IPA, will present findings from IPA’s Two-Generation Initiative and a learning partnership with BRAC that focused on integrating BRAC's Humanitarian Play Labs with the Ultra-Poor Graduation approach among ultra-poor households in refugee and host communities in Uganda's West Nile region. The RCT assessed the impact of the UPG program for households with a child attending a Play Lab and found it improved children's school readiness scores as measured by the IDELA, with Play lab parenting session attendance and reduced financial strain together explaining 75 percent of the effect on child development outcomes.
