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This paper evaluates the impact of an innovative programme that was implemented by BRAC in rural Bangladesh, aiming at assisting extremely poor households. The document clarifies that asset transfers constituted the centre-piece of this multidimensional programme, but it also included training, organisation building, cash supports and micro-finance. The authors reveal that impressive income gains have been achieved, though negative events such as illnesses and house damage have resulted in asset losses for several assisted households.

The paper introduces the five Cs (confidence, cohesion, capacity, connections and cash) in order to assess the programme under study. The authors conclude that while cash can be, and often is, an important element of a package of assistance, giving out cash without paying heed to the other four Cs is unlikely to produce a lasting impact.

Furthermore, they draw the following lessons:

• while designing programme elements, planners should pay heed not only to the potential for gains but also to the likelihood of losses 
• in fact, influencing households’ balance of negative and positive events is the critical task of development 
• in this sense, the objective that a community-level development programmes must serve is to raise the ability of poor people to deal with sources of risk while improving their prospects for upward mobility 
• assisting the poorest households to build stocks of productive assets helps protect them to some extent against downside risks 
• building connections with sources of low-cost financing for health care and house repair costs helps affected households to make the payments in due more easily without necessarily disposing of their assets 
• pooling risks through appropriate insurance mechanisms, like community-level risk-sharing, can serve as a promising avenue for future action.
  
  
  
  

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