Evidence Generation
Asia
Evidence Generation
Asia
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Despite significant progress in recent decades, extreme poverty remains a persistent challenge, affecting nearly ten percent of the global population.1 Most of these households are located in rural farming communities and face multiple interconnected barriers that prevent them from improving their livelihoods, including limited income-generating opportunities, poor health, and low aspirations. IPA has supported evidence that shows the graduation programs—which address these constraints simultaneously through asset transfers, training, and coaching—have been successful in reducing extreme poverty and improving women's empowerment. However, most graduation programs target only the lowest-income households and still largely use expensive individualized training approaches that limit their scalability.
Emerging research suggests that supporting entire villages can create positive economic and social ripple effects2 and can be cost-effective through group-based training if the barriers households face are shared across the community. As such, this can potentially generate larger poverty reductions than just supporting select households. Testing the village-level graduation approach in Uganda—which is among 14 countries accounting for 80 percent of people living in extreme poverty globally3—can provide critical evidence for similar contexts across rural Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Raising The Village (RTV) program is a universal livelihoods intervention that adapts core elements of the Graduation Approach while delivering support at the village level rather than targeting individual households. Implemented over a 24-month period, the program provides integrated support to all households in participating villages, with all adult household members expected to participate. RTV addresses multiple dimensions of poverty through five integrated components:
RTV differs from traditional approaches by delivering a universal livelihoods program to all households in a village through a community-based model and smaller productive asset support, which translates directly into lower costs. The six Graduation programs evaluated in Abhijit Banerjee et al. (2015) cost, on average, USD 3,612 per household (2014 USD Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)), driven by large asset transfers, intensive individualized coaching, and targeting. In contrast, RTV costs approximately USD 288 per household (2014 USD PPP), with direct asset transfers of about USD 111 per household (2014 USD PPP), while maintaining a comprehensive package of support.
Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation in Uganda to measure the impact of RTV’s universal graduation program. The project involved nearly 4,000 households in 335 villages in Kagadi and Kyenjojo districts of western Uganda. Villages were combined into 114 groups, with about three villages per group. Half of the groups were randomly assigned to receive the program, and half were in a comparison group that did not receive the program.
Researchers collected data after three years to measure impacts on different indicators relating to household economic outcomes and well-being.
Over this period, households in RTV villages changed how they earned income, built assets, and managed risk. Rather than relying primarily on subsistence farming supplemented by low-paid casual labor, households increasingly invested in their own farms, livestock, and small businesses, leading to improvements in income, wealth, consumption, and resilience across the wealth distribution. On average, monthly household income in participating households increased by 26 percent (USD 40, 2023 PPP), driven by multiple channels, with farm income providing about half of the total gain and non-farm enterprise profits contributing approximately one-third. These income gains led to increased ownership of long-term productive assets, higher savings, and greater overall wealth, including a 31 percent increase in total non-land wealth and a 30 percent increase in savings, indicating that income gains supported durable wealth accumulation rather than short-term gains alone.
Consumption improved, particularly food security. Monthly household consumption increased by 10 percent (USD 59 in 2023 PPP), with even more pronounced gains during the lean season, where consumption rose by 38.8 percent. Households were significantly less likely to reduce meal sizes or skip meals, and the program helped households smooth consumption and remain more resilient during the lean season. Underlying these changes was a shift in how households used their labor, reducing reliance on casual wage work and reallocating time toward their own farms, livestock, and businesses, with work increasing by 3.3 days per month and a marked shift away from casual labor toward household enterprises. All households benefited, and concerns about village-wide competition did not materialize, with households specializing based on their starting conditions and welfare gains seen across all groups.
The magnitude of impacts observed under the RTV program is comparable to those documented in evaluations of both large one-time cash transfers and traditional Graduation programs. Across core outcomes—including income, consumption, and asset accumulation—the estimated effect sizes fall within the range reported in multi-country evaluations of targeted Graduation interventions and are broadly aligned with impacts observed in large-scale cash transfer programs. This comparison underscores that similar economic and livelihood gains can be achieved through a universal, village-level approach at a substantially lower cost per household, while delivering benefits across the full distribution of households within poor rural villages without diminishing impact.
Given its low per-household cost, the RTV program delivers high economic returns relative to investment. Combining program costs with measured gains in consumption and assets, the evaluation estimates a return of 271 percent within three years—implying that for every USD 1 invested, households gained approximately USD 2.71 in economic benefits over the evaluation period. These estimates are conservative, as they account only for benefits realized within the first three years, assume zero benefits in the first year, and exclude potential longer-term gains as well as improvements in health, mental wellbeing, and social cohesion that were observed but not monetized. Overall, the program is shown to be an exceptionally cost-effective intervention, with a three-year benefit–cost ratio of 271 percent, between four and eleven times larger than those found in comparable programs, including the Graduation Approach4 and one-time cash transfers.5
1. United Nations Statistics Division, “Extreme poverty persists, affecting one in ten people worldwide,” United Nations, date accessed December 3, 2025, https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2025/goal-01/
2. Egger, Dennis, Johannes Haushofer, Edward Miguel, Paul Niehaus, and Michael Walker. "General equilibrium effects of cash transfers: experimental evidence from Kenya." Econometrica 90, no. 6 (2022): 2603-2643.
3. Henry Stemmler, Martha Viveros, Federico Haslop, Maria Eugenia Genoni, Christoph Lakner, “Getting to zero: focusing on IDA countries for ending poverty,” World Bank Blogs, November 21, 2024, https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/getting-to-zero--focusing-on-ida-countries-for-ending-poverty
4. Banerjee, Abhijit, Esther Duflo, Nathanael Goldberg, Dean Karlan, Robert Osei, William Parienté, Jeremy Shapiro, Bram Thuysbaert, and Christopher Udry. "A multifaceted program causes lasting progress for the very poor: Evidence from six countries." Science 348, no. 6236 (2015): 1260799.
Bandiera, Oriana, Robin Burgess, Narayan Das, Selim Gulesci, Imran Rasul, and Munshi Sulaiman. "Labor markets and poverty in village economies." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 132, no. 2 (2017): 811-870.
5. Orkin, Kate, Rob Garlick, Mahreen Mahmud, Richard Sedlmayr, Johannes Haushofer, and Stefan Dercon, “Aspiring to a better future: Can a simple psychological intervention reduce poverty?” Review of Economic Studies (Forthcoming).
