CLP had supported just over 78,000 extreme-poor households on the chars by the time our operations wrapped up in February 2016. To judge the success of our intervention, CLP developed a set of ten ‘graduation’ criteria by which households were measured against at the end of their 18-months of support. The criteria related to income/ expenditure / consumption, nutrition, asset base, status of females, vulnerability and access to services (See table 1).

To graduate, a household had to meet any 6 (or more) of these criteria within 3 months of completing the Programme. If they did, they were considered to be on the right trajectory out of extreme poverty. The Programme’s goal was for 85% of the households (equivalent to around 66,300 households) it supported to graduate. Our latest, and final, report on the graduation rates of all of our cohorts (2.1-2.6) showed that CLP not only met our target, we exceeded it. Panel sample surveys revealed that 89.7% of CLP households graduated. That’s the equivalent of 69,989 households!

Table 1: CLP Graduation Criteria

The latest report on graduation rates also highlighted some interesting results. For example, the criteria met by the highest proportion of households were:

• Household eats three meals a day and consumes five or more food groups in the past week
• Presence of ash/ soap near water point or latrine
• Household has membership in a social group

On the other hand, the criteria met by relatively fewer households were:

• Household has cash savings of more than Tk. 3,000
• Household has access to improved water
• Household has productive assets worth more than Tk. 30,000

Our graduation model, methodology and lessons learnt have been of interest to similar programmes in Bangladesh and further afield. To share our experience of developing and implementing the criteria, we developed a presentation with accompanying notes which can be accessed here.

To read more about our overall graduation rates, click here.

To read more about the sustainability of graduation rates, click here.