an Eldis Resource
Towards a profile of the ultra poor in Bangladesh: findings from CFPR/TUP baseline survey
Baseline study of the ultra poor population living in some of the poorest districts of Bangladesh
Authors:
; Research and Evaluation Division, BRAC
Publisher:
Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee , 2004
This report is a baseline study of the ultra poor population living in some of the poorest districts of Bangladesh. The baseline study was carried out as a part of BRAC's new targeted programme for the ultra poor, called Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction: Targeting the Ultra Poor (CFPR/TUP) introduced since 2001. The programme aims to reach 70,000 ultra poor households by 2006. The programme uses an asset based framework to address extreme poverty where a range of income generating assets and inputs are provided as one-off grants along with intensive training, health care, and engaging the local elite to provide social protection for the ultra poor. As the targeted ultra poor women start earning from the enterprises provided as grants, they are gradually included within BRAC's mainstream development programmes, such as microfinance.
The study attempts to develop a comprehensive profile of the ultra poor covering a range of dimensions, such as health, nutrition, consumption, employment, financial market participation, education, and social status. Two main messages emerge:
- in almost all dimensions severe inequities exist between the extreme poor and other categories of the rural poor. These differences depict a structural break rather than a continuum between the extreme poor and other categories of the rural poor, suggesting that programmes for the extreme poor will have to be far more intensive in its effort and also far more diverse in its strategies that programmes that typically work for other poverty groups
- even among the extreme poor as defined by the community members through participatory wealth ranking exercises, important differences exist. The targeting strategy used in BRAC's CFPR/TUP programme uses a combination of participatory wealth raking and survey based instruments which led to effective targeting of the extreme poor. Such combinations of methodologies are thus helpful when targeting the extreme poor, especially through grants based strategies, where inclusion error is more of a concern.
