Helping the ultra-poor develop sustainable livelihoods is a global priority, but policymakers are faced with competing ideas about the best way to approach this problem.

In Uganda, Village Enterprise and IPA partnered with researchers to conduct a randomized evaluation that measured the impact of diverse components and variants of Village Enterprise’s graduation-style program, which provides poor households with a combination of cash transfers, mentorship, business training, and support for the formation of businesses and savings groups over a one-year period.

At this dissemination event, Dianne Calvi, Village Enterprise's CEO, presented an overview of the Village Enterprise Graduation Program, Richard Sedlmayr of Oxford University presented the preliminary results of the evaluation, and Nathanael Goldberg, Program Director of IPA’s Social Protection Program, followed with a talk placing these results in the context of a larger research agenda around graduation-style programs and cash transfers.

Following these presentations, Sedlmayr, Goldberg, IPA Chief Research and Policy Officer Imran Matin, and Village Enterprise Director of Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Celeste Brubaker participated in a question-and-answer session with the audience.