Programmes aimed at alleviating poverty must be designed in cost-effective ways before they can be used by government as viable public policy at scale
To find out more about this multifaceted poverty alleviation programme, read here.
Can interventions at the household level create significant and lasting impacts on the incomes and welfare of extremely poor families? Dean Karlan of the Global Poverty Research Lab, Northwestern University, shares insights from a multifaceted, six-pronged programme which also included the provision of productive assets in Bangladesh that generated positive returns for households along various socioeconomic indicators with the effects persisting for as long as three years after the intervention. However, such programmes can be quite costly for countries to roll out at a large scale. He then highlights the importance of being able to innovate on and scale up such interventions in cost-effective ways, for instance by reducing the number of household visits or distributing productive assets to groups rather than individuals to lower costs and to help poor populations across the world.