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Tackling Extreme Poverty through Programmes Targeting the World's Ultra-Poor
01:31:37
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- [00:00]
A
My name is Robin Burgess. I'm director of the International Growth center and also professor of Economics here at the London School of Economics. So we have a. As my kids say, do you want the bad news or the good news? So the bad news is that unfortunately Sir Fazlay Abed, who was intending to give the keynote is unwell. He is in London. So in some strange way he's brought us all together and then disappeared. But it's unfortunate. But so what we're going to do is we're going to have Mushtaq Chowdhury, who's the vice chair of brac, and Mohammed Moussa, both of whom are on the stage, who's the executive director to talk about what Sir Fazli Abed wished to talk about, which was this graduation program which is going to be the focus of this session and sort of its role in the sort of wider context of social innovation. Mushtaq has been with BRAC for a very long time, so I think he'll be an able replacement. So just to give you a sense of what we're going to do, so this is sponsored by the International Growth center and by Bracing and the International Growth center is a center headquartered here at the LSC done in collaboration with Oxford University. And the kind of value proposition is that we have 15 country offices spread across South Asia and Africa which basically bring together two communities which have not come together directly, which are the academic researcher community, well represented in the LSC and places like MIT and so forth with the policy community. So we start trying to start projects which are talking about how to promote economic growth in these big regions of the world where the extreme poor tend to be concentrated. And we work in four areas, in areas around the state, around firms, around energy and cities. And so today we're really going to be talking about a large scale collaboration which has actually gone on for a very long time now between the LSC and BRAC and has now as Astor will be talking about sort of spread to other countries in the world. So the lineup is that Mushtaq Chowdhury, the vice chair of brac, will begin by giving the keynote on the graduation program. And then very usefully, Mohammed Moussa, who is with us all day, we've just spent a day with about 120 people from the academic and policy communities talking about this graduation program. He'll give you some of the takeaways of what we found. And then that will be followed by the honorable Desmond Swain who thankfully is somewhat familiar with this program has recently visited Bangladesh, but more importantly will have a sense of the importance of this program in the wider context of the SDGs. So Desmond Swain is the Minister of State for the Department for International Development. So he will give a talk right after the presentations by Mushtaq Choudhary and Mohammad Moussa. And then that will be followed by two talks, one by Anna Minj. What's interesting there is Anna is actually responsible for the targeting the ultra poor program in Blank Shinsu. She's at the coal face of the graduation program. And then that will be followed by two evaluation talks, one by Orianna Bandir on Bangladesh on the BRAC graduation program, and then by Esther Duflo from MIT and J. Pal on six evaluations of the same program in six completely different contexts across the world. So then we'll follow that by question and answer. And I should say that the kind of interesting thing here, at least for me, is that a very long time ago in 2006, when I went out to Bangladesh, I was sort of shown this program in its pilot stage. And what was interesting is basically it's an attempt to give a large amount of capital and a large amount of skills and support to literally the poorest women in these villages and to see whether they can shift into different types of occupations. And I'm, I guess, like many academics, quite sort of skeptical, quite agnostic who does this work. And so I saw the women in the pilot stage and it was interesting that already then you could sort of see that something had happened to them in terms of the type of work they're engaged in, the types of assets they were owning, and also just the way that they stood with the landowners and others. Obviously, when somebody like me shows up in a Bangladesh village, everybody shows up. And you could sort of sense that there was something had happened to them. And I think Mushtaq will be sort of talking about that aspect. So without further ado, let me pass the stage to. To Mushtaq Chowdhury. Thank you very much.
- [05:45]
B
Honorable Minister, friends on the daisy, distinguished audience, students, teachers, friends, a very good evening to you. First of all, I also wanted to apologize on behalf of my boss, the founder of brac, Sir Fazlay Hassan Abed, who has suddenly fallen sick. So he's unable to attend and he has asked me to fill in his shoes. But as you can understand, it's not easy to fill in his shoes. Two years ago, the medical journal Lancet, they published a profile on me. And one of the things I said in that profile is that whatever Sir Fazli Hassan Abed has achieved, if I can achieve at least 10% of that, I will feel that I am successful in life. So you can imagine that his shoes are at least 10 times bigger than mine. So with this premise, I am pleased to speak to you. I'm very pleased to be here at lse. Whenever I come, I really feel a little nostalgic because I spent a year at LSE about 35 years ago as a master's to, and what I learned at that time, the experience I had, had a profound effect on my life and the life that I lived since then. So I'm very grateful to LSE and the opportunity that the LSE offers. I come from Bangladesh, and as you know, that Bangladesh is a small country with a big population. It's probably about the size of England, actually, but it has a population of 160 million. So that sort of gives some idea of the type of challenges that we face in Bangladesh. But despite that, if you look at what the country has achieved over the last 20, 30 years, it's really, really amazing. In terms of most of the development indicators, the MDGs, Bangladesh is on track to achieve most of the MDGs, actually. So, for example, with respect to children in school, the enrollment at the primary level, more than 95% of the children are now going to school. They are enrolled in school. In terms of health, the infant mortality has been reduced to about 40, which was about 150 at the time Bangladesh became independent in 1971. The fertility rate, the number of children that a woman leaves at the end of her reproductive period, it was about 6, only about 30 years ago. Now it has been reduced to about 2.2, which is the replacement level. So Bangladesh has done very well over the last several years. In terms of life expectancy, Bangladesh's life expectancy is 70 years. But more interestingly, the gender dimension of that. Only about 20 years ago, Bangladesh was one of the three or four countries in the world where women lived a shorter life. Biologically, the women should live longer, but Bangladesh was an exception. But if you look at the longevity, the life expectancy of men and women, you see that the women are now living at least one year more than men. So this has been achieved, which we are very proud of. In terms of poverty in the 80s, about 60% of the Bangladeshis were poor. But recent statistics are showing that this has come down to about 24%. A lot of things have been written on this achievement of the country. And they have been trying to analyze why this has happened. If we compare Bangladesh with our neighbors, India or Pakistan, they are much richer than us in terms of per capita income, but the achievement are much higher for us. So what is going on in the country? Researchers and academics like Professor Omarto Sen, they have also been doing research on what is going on in the country. So one of the things that they all agree is that Bangladesh has a very vibrant civil society. There are problems of governance in the country. But despite these problems of governance, the country is moving ahead. And the NGOs are playing a very important role in that. And BRAC, for which I work, I have been working with BRAC since 1977, is one of such NGOs. And all the analysis that have been done on Bangladesh's recent development actually allude much of the progress to what BRAC and similar other NGOs do in the country. So we are very proud to be part of BRAC. BRAC was set up in 1972 as an NGO. Initially, we did relief work. There were about 10 million refugees who were coming back from India after the war of liberation. And the immediate task was to rehabilitate those refugees. So that's how BRAC was started. But we soon discovered that relief is not the solution for the poor people, for women, they need development. So we started different development activities. So we set up four clinics to take care of health services, and we employed doctors. But within six months, all the doctors resigned because they don't want to work in the rural areas. So that was one of our first failures, I must say. We started the micro finance program back in 1974. And the initial idea was that the cooperatives that we were setting up at that time would be linked to a government bank, and the government bank would give loans to these poor people. But the government bank was not ready to provide loans without any collateral to the poor people. So that also failed. Then we also started an education program for the adults, and that was quite successful. Borrowing the ideas from the Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire, we developed this functional education program which actually emphasized concentration. In the words of Paulo Freire, concentration is consciousness, which with action, so you become not only conscious, but if you are conscious, you should also act in order to improve your situation. So we have been working on this concertization for a long time. 1978 was the year of the child. And the founders of BRAC have always been thinking about large things, because it's probably in the DNA of black leaders that if something is effective in A small village. It is our responsibility to take it to as many people as possible. So the scaling is a major kind of thing that we want to practice. So 1978 was, was the year of the child. And Brac wanted to do something significant for the whole country. We thought that at that time immunization was something that UNICEF was promoting. And we thought that we should help the government to intensify the immunization program. But at that time electricity was not there in every sub district. But in order to do an immunization program you need a cold chain. So that was not possible. Then we thought about diarrhea because diarrhea was a major cause of death in the country for the children. And the best solution for diarrhea was ort, oral dehydration therapy. It was discovered in Bangladesh, but it was never used for the mass people. So Bragg thought that we should really adapt it to the local situation. And we developed a local formula with salt and sugar. So it is only. Mixing of a pinch of salt and a fistful of sugar into half liter of water. And that gives your ors. So we decided to bring this to the common people, to everybody in the country. And we trained back workers, they went from house to house and taught this message to every woman in the country. We decided, we thought that it is very important that we want to see the impact of that program on mortality, child mortality. So with the help of best minds internationally, we developed a research design and started collecting data. One of the data that we collected was whether the mothers were using this solution when their children have diarrhea. And to our great frustration, we found that only 10% of the children were given the solution. So this was a big frustration for us because we thought that if you give the knowledge to the people, they will automatically start using that. So there was a huge knowledge and practice gap. So we started doing research. What is the reason for this? And we found there are many reasons. One of the reasons was that the health workers who were teaching mothers, they themselves didn't believe in this ors. So if I am a teacher and if I don't believe what I teach, obviously that teaching won't be very effective. So we brought all the health workers to the Cholera Research Laboratory in Dhaka and then showed them how ORS works and they were convinced and they went back and started teaching. So that helped us to bring the ORS use rate from 10% to 15%. But it was still very, very low. So we did other research and we found that. There is a sort of A lack of the involvement of men because the black health workers were men, women and also the. They were teaching women in the. In the household. So the men were not at all involved in that. And so, so, so in our society it is a man dominated society. So when the question comes about using something which is new, men play a very important role. And the woman told us that her husband didn't allow her to use this. So that was another learning. And we started involving men through that. The reason I'm saying all these example is that this is something we learned from very early on that you have to have research and evaluation as part of your problems. That's why BRAC has been giving huge lot of attention on evidence generation. BRAC is probably one of the NGOs which has a very large research and evaluation division. We have about 100 people working. So that's one of the learning that, That we had. Another problem. As I said that since 1974 we have been trying to implement a microfinance program. But this microfinance program that we started in 1974, as I said, failed. But then we sort of refined that program and then. And by 1990, a large number of households are being covered by the microfinance program. When I did the research on who is getting the loan, we discovered that that the poorest of the poor for which such a loan is meant for, they were not getting the loan. They were kept completely out of their reach of micro credit. And again we started doing research to find out why the poorest of the poor, whom we call the ultra poor, are not getting the loan. We found that there are both supply side problem. Also there are demand side problem. Demand side in the sense that the micro credit has several rituals. So for example, if I am a microcredit group member, I have to attend a weekly meeting which takes about two hours. But if I am an ultra poor woman, I have to work in order to support my family. And if I go to the meeting, then I cannot work and I have to forego the wage for that day. So it was not very, very good for the ultra poor women to access credit. There are also supply side problems. So for example, if I am a credit officer, I will think three times before I give a loan that the person I am giving loan to will be able to repay it. And if it is ultra poor women, I know as a credit officer that the ultra poor woman will not be able to pay it back. So those were some of the reasons why the microcredit program that we are running at that time was not reaching the ultra poor or the poorest of the poor. So this led us to think about a new product, new program, and that led to what we now call the Targeting the Ultra Poor program. And we are here today actually to talk about this program. This program was started in 2002 and over the last 50 years, 13 years, we have actually reached about 1 1/2 million popula, 1 1/2 million families. My colleague Anna Mej will be talking more about this program and I'm not going to more details on that.
- [23:23]
A
Now.
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B
What makes BRAC different? What are the distinguishing features of brac? One of the things is that we believe that we believe in the power of the people. We believe that it is the people who can change their own destiny. It is people who can change their life. It's the people who themselves can change their future. So that's one thing that we believe in. Secondly is that we believe in the holistic nature of poverty. The goal of BRAC is poverty alleviation and empowerment of the poor and women. And the way that we look at poverty is in a very wide holistic way. It is not only about a lack of income or a lack of employment that makes one poor. It is actually, It's a combination of many other factors which make one poor. It is the lack of access to health care, it is lack of access to education, it is the disempowerment of, of the women. So all these cause poverty. And in order to address poverty, we have to have programs which address all the causes of poverty. So that's why we have programs on education, on health, on empowerment of women, on climate change and so on. And we believe in scale, as I said earlier. And all our programs are large programs. The ultra poor program, as I said, that we reach about 1 1/2, half million families. But in microfinance we have about 5 million borrowers. So that's one of the top microfinance organization in the country. In terms of education, we have programs starting from early childhood to primary to secondary and to the tertiary education. BRAC runs and university which has about 7,000 students. And it is now one of the top universities in the country. In terms of primary education, BRAC runs about 40,000 schools which enrolls about 1 million children. And BRAC program on primary education is the largest private sector educational program in the world. In terms of health, BRAC has large programs on tuberculosis for example. Indeed, Bangladesh is probably the only country in the world where the entire TB program tuberculosis program has been handed over to NGOs to implement. And BRAC covers about two thirds of the country through this. And the results are astounding. When the who, the World Health Organization has set the treatment completion rate to be achieved at 85%, BRAC rates is 95%. So the quality of program is also very important for us. And today you also talked about, when you were talking about the ultra poor programs, we talked about the way the programs are implemented and we give huge attention to how to implement program in the best possible way. So the scaling is a major distinguishing feature of BRAC transparency. BRAC believes in transparency. We have an internal audit department which is over 300 people. So this is probably the largest internal audit department in any NGO in the world. Moreover, over the last 15 years we have been having an ombuds person who doesn't report to the executive director, he reports directly to the board and he's the person who sort of takes care of any complaints that may come from anybody within the country, not only from BRAC, but also from outside. The other feature is that BRAC believes in sustainability, its own sustainability. And since the 70s we have been trying to set up enterprises, but not an enterprise just for making profit, but enterprises which really helps to. Support a program. So for example, we have, we're the second largest producer of milk in the, in Bangladesh. And why you set up a dairy industry? Because we give loan to the farmers to raise cows. But the farmers don't get good prices because they live in far flung areas. And the difference between the price of milk in the village and that of that in Dhaka is huge. So we thought that we have to find a way to sort of help these women market their milk in the cities. So we set up this dairy plant and we collect milk from the villages and then process it and then market it in the, in the shops of Dhaka and Chittagong, the big cities. Also we found that the cows that we have, they do not produce enough milk. So we imported cements from Holland and from New Zealand and we have started an artificial insemination program through which we are trying to improve the breed which will produce more milk. So also that we didn't have a good health program for the cattle. So we trained the local. Inoculators and linked them with the, with the government. And they now inoculate the cows which reduces mortality. So this is an example of why we are sort of building enterprises in order to support our programs. BRAC spends about nearly a billion dollar every year. So that's our budget, but 70% of our budget actually come from our own sources. And the enterprise that I was talking about is one of the sources of that. So we are dependent on donors for about 30% of our expenditures, our budget. And we are so grateful to our donors. So we are particularly grateful to DFID because we have a very special relationship with them. We have what we call the spa, the Strategic Partnership Agreement between dfid, BRAC and the Australian government, through which they give us budget support. And this is something which is a new paradigm in financing development. So this has been so helpful, and we are really grateful to our donors for the support they're providing to us. So, I mean, those are some of the kind of distinguishing features of brac. And we are sort of so proud to be working with many of our partners, such as the London School of economics in 2002, as I said that we decided to go international. So the Taliban war in 2002 and Afghanistan was a kind of a turning point for us in the sense that we decided to go international. So Afghanistan is the first country that we went to outside Bangladesh. Now BRAC is present in 11 countries in Asia, Africa, and also in the Caribbean. And what we see is that the solution that has been born in Bangladesh, in the south, are also more or less applicable to most of the countries we work. Only thing that you have to do is to adapt that to the local situation. The people, the poor people have similar problems and they also have similar aspirations. So whatever solutions we are able to develop is applicable for most of the poor in other countries. So we are very, very, very proud to be working in other southern countries. So that's what I wanted to talk about. And. But again, I'm very grateful to you for opportunity to speak. And again, on behalf of the founder of brac, we apologize that he is not able to join here today. I'm sure his speech would have been much sort of rewarding for you, but as I said that his shows are 10 times bigger than mine, at least. So with these few words, thank you very much for the opportunity.
- [34:23]
A
Now I'd like to welcome the right honorable Devin.
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C
Professor. Can I start by thanking the International Growth Centre for its sponsorship and for its hospitality and for the great work that you do. And Mushtaq, if you can take back to Sir Faisal my congratulations on the extraordinary achievements of BRAC over the last 43 years and my best wishes for a speedy recovery. My own personal recommendation is I find that alcohol is a great reviver. And the moment you feel unwell, you should begin to drink heavily. Comrades, my overwhelmingly the greatest event of my development year as minister was visiting a youth club in the chores of Bangladesh, where there were run by BRAC and there were what was described as adolescent females, what I would call young women, about 25 young women and about half a dozen extraordinarily lucky fellows who had also been included in this youth club. And the afternoon began with my arrival and they were playing board games on the floor and I wandered around and chatted to them and they were playing musical instruments that they had made. And after a while they got up and performed an extraordinary dance that they had choreographed themselves. And then there was a play, an instructive play in which the dangers and the solutions, the strategies for solving the problem of early and forced marriage were explored. And then, just as they were about to come to the climax of the day, a busy, officious gentleman got up to explain that the minister was very busy and of course the program was behind schedule and unfortunately we had to get on and that was the end of that. And we then saw what I thought was a magnificent example of the empowerment of women when one of these girls got up. Now, of course, all this took place in what I presume was Bengali, but you can tell what people are saying from the tone of their voices usually. And she got up and I'm sure I pretty well paraphrase what she said. She said, now look here, we've been looking forward to this and we've worked very hard and we've rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed and we're bloody well going to carry on with this or we'll be very pissed off indeed. So shove it. And they got up and performed what they had been rehearsing, which was their ninja skills. It was a terrifying performance. I have some military experience, I served in Iraq. I would counsel any young man not to cross any one of those young women because of their ability to be able to deal with them quite robustly. So that's my experience of brac. I'm glad to say that we've been. We've been in partnership. I think the partnership with what was the predecessor for the Department of International Development began as far back as 1970. And we are now engaged in this great joint endeavour to deliver the global goal of abolishing absolute poverty by 2030, leaving no one behind. That is the important principle by which that goal has to be delivered. And that means, therefore skills, education and livelihoods for even the most marginalised, be that girls or the disabled or whatever, absolutely inclusive. That is the measure by which this must be delivered. So it's all about jobs in the end, because it's only by secure employment that you will build the resilience to be able to not slip back into poverty. It's only through secure employment you will be able to afford nutrition, health care and education for your dependents. And it comes down to be able to deliver the transformative development that will deliver livelihoods and jobs. Now, brac, with whom we are now working actually across the globe in a global partnership in Africa and in Asia. But if you look at their work in Bangladesh, it has an extraordinary reach. 50,000 villages, 120 million people with as we've heard, 4.6 million borrowers from the micro finance arrangements that they provide a truly extraordinary reach. Now in 2011, we entered a strategic partnership along with our allies Australia with BRAC, into which we have invested some £223 million. And it's one of the best investments that we have made in order to lift a million people out of poverty. And from that program has developed this integrated development programme, the graduation model, which I think is a key deliverable. We mustn't underestimate the difficulty of achieving the global goal of abolishing absolute poverty in 15 years time. But I honestly believe in BRAC we have found a model by which it can be achieved. Thank you.
- [41:21]
A
Okay, thank you. So now I'm going to welcome Anna Minj, who is the director of the TUP program. So we're now going to get into the nitty gritty of what this program is. And then the last two presentations before Mr. Musa sums up will be by Esther Dufleur and Orianna of the evaluation of the programs.
- [41:38]
D
Good evening. I am privileged to be here and share our program especially around targeting the ultra poor. Before I start talking about the program in detail, I wanted to give some background information why targeting the ultra poor program is in Bangladesh. As our vice chair mentioned that our country is small, but this country is having 158 million population and out of this 17% are living below the poverty line. And these extreme poor people suffer from chronic hunger, malnutrition and also they have inadequate shelter and they are highly prone to many types of diseases, deprived of education and are particularly vulnerable to natural disasters. And in this context we do have safety net programs of government, but this program mainly serves as protective approach rather than promotional or transformational approach. And also another important aspect that even though Bangladesh is the birthplace of microfinance and many other development interventions, but ultra poor people are Largely bypassed by these interventions. And realizing that reality, BRAC started this targeting the ultra Poor program in 2002. And especially this program is designed to meet the needs of ultra poor households who are too poor to access the benefit from the traditional development interventions. And this program has emerged based on brac's three decades of experiences from its rural poverty alleviation program. And this Targeting the ultra poor program is two years cycle. And objective of this program is to assist the ultra poor population to graduate from extreme poverty by bringing positive economic, social and aspirational changes in their lives. And second objective is to support them to get access to the mainstreaming development program. So to achieve this objective, we very carefully and systematically implement certain components. Number one component is targeting. We actually carefully target this population to identify members, those who are most in need. And to do that we apply participatory rural appraisal and we involve here the whole community. And in this PRA process they do social mapping, wealth ranking and later on we do the door to door survey and also verification. And finally, the people who are selected for the program, normally they have less than 10 decimal of land, they have no productive asset and they depend on irregular day laboring or begging. And they have no active male member who can be engaged in regular income earning. And the second aspect is asset transfer and stipend. Each client receives a package of assets and stipend for certain period of time. And asset transfer helps this member to create an economic asset base. And stipend act as breathing space while they acquire new skills. And in the process we also encourage them to save, to build up savings habit. And the third component is trainings. We provide them three to five days classroom training on enterprise development and also hands on training by weekly home visits and confidence building training. And this training particularly designed to enable them to maintain a self driven upwardly mobile trajectory from extreme poverty. And component four is tailor made health care. Our members receive health care support with access to community health workers, physicians and medications. And this is to stop or reduce the erosion of income from spending on health care. Another important component is community mobilization and social integration. And this is to support the sustainable development for the extreme poor through social integration. And in the process we form village poverty reduction committee as a platform for social support and also provide them security for their asset and also protect them from maltreatment or injustices in the community. So these are the five very specific components we adopt during this two year cycle. Let me focus on some of the key factors, key success factors, why this program is actually successful and working. We think that providing skills skills along with the assets and consumptions to improve their livelihood is critical for longer term sustainability and as a result when we move away from any particular area, by then the members have already gained some skills and knowledge to run by themselves. And second key success factor we think that quite coaching and hand holding is very important. It's a must to boost up their confidence as they are not only lagging behind economically, they are also socially excluded and their confidence level remains very low and through coaching we unpack their social problems. And third success factor we think that program is not only focusing on targeting and asset transfer, rather it works with them through holistic approach to address their other different needs like health care and social inclusion. So these are couple of key success factors we think helping program to go on and few ideas about next step or scale up In Bragg Bangladesh definitely we will be continuing this program and we will be covering additional over a half a million households by 2020 in addition to 1.6 million households as still there are 21 million populations yet to cover in Bangladesh. And again we will be also expanding this approach in black international countries, particularly in Uganda, Tanzania, Sierra Leone and Liberia. When we say that we will keep on continuing, that means in all phases Bragg has actually continuously tried to refine the approaches and did some adjustments. So during this next phase during 1620 also we will be doing some new innovations and adjustment to make it more cost effective and efficient. And second we will be focusing on advocacy of this graduation model at national and international level to influence government and other players to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030 as per SDG. And also thirdly we have plan to help others to implement graduation approach and this we do in collaboration with BRAC USA and here we provide technical assistance consulting to government and implementing organizations where they request. And also we will create implementation guidelines, training materials for new implementers and also we facilitate immersion visits to facilitate learning and experience sharing about the graduation model. So this is very shortly I have explained and to summarize my discussion I thought of running a small video.
- [51:56]
E
This is Sabina. She lives in Bangladesh. She works hard every day and yet struggles to eat one meal a day and support her family with their necessities like clean water and education. 1.2 billion people live under the extreme poverty line of $1.25 a day. Sabina is one of hundreds of millions of people living on less than half that especially marginalized and vulnerable, barely able to sustain themselves. They are the ultra poor. But Sabina has found a way to break free from extreme poverty through an organization called brac. She will get a foothold on the economic ladder and continue fighting. She will have graduated from extreme poverty and she won't be going back. Since 1972, BRAC has been creating opportunities for people to lift themselves out of poverty through healthcare, microfinance and other interventions. But even BRAC's most successful programs have had difficulty reaching the very poorest. In 2002, in order to address the unique needs of people like Sabina, BRAC created a set of interventions tailored for the ultra poor. The process begins by engaging communities and helping them identify which families are in the greatest need. Once chosen, Sabina and her family get a one time grant of an asset like a goat or a package of goods for small trade which helps them jumpstart their livelihoods. Sabina also receives a cash stipend along with regular training and hands on guidance as she learns to make a living. She gets health support, learns how to save, gains confidence and becomes better integrated in her community. Over the next 24 months, Sabina's life is transformed. She earns enough to eat regular meals, drink safe water and send her children to school. In Bangladesh, BRAC has reached more than 1.4 million households. The impact is significant and well documented with more than 95% of participants graduating out of extreme poverty and moving forward with hope. In collaboration with CGAP and the Ford foundation, other organizations have successfully adapted brac's model in other parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Today, BRAC is ready to work with partners, governments and donors to implement this proven program for ending exposure poverty around the world. Partner with us@brac.net.
- [54:47]
D
Thank you.
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A
Thank you very much. So now we're going to get into the nitty gritty of the two evaluations. So to begin with, can I invite Orianna Bundiera, who's the director of Stickard and also professor here to do the Bangladesh.
- [55:05]
F
Thank you. Okay, so it's a tough act to follow. I have no movie, no music, just hardcore economics. So prepare to be bored to death. Let me actually take it from what the Minister said. It's all about jobs. And so I'm going to tell you what jobs for these women look like in these very poor communities. And BRAC being brac, this is going to be based on a very large scale survey. Nothing can be done in a small scale with BRAC. So we look at 1300 villages and 23,000 households. So about 100,000 people living in these villages. And these households belong to every wealth class that you can imagine within these villages. And that allows us to give you a sense of what the labor markets look for these women in these villages. And I'm going to tell you four facts. The first, which is perhaps the one that we found most surprising, is that the choice of jobs is extremely limited. If you look at these bars, each bar represents one occupation. And the total sum of the bar represents the total number of hours worked by these women in these communities. And you see that by and large, there are three colors. Each bar represents a black branch area. And by and large, there are only three colors. There is some white, which is a residual category, but there are mostly three things. And these three things are casual labor in agriculture, casual labour as maids, and livestock rearing. Now, each dot here represents the hourly wage in these three jobs. And again, green is livestock rating like before. Blue is casual labor in agriculture, and red is casual labour as domestic maid. You see clearly that casual labor in agriculture and domestic made pays a lot less. And that's true across all of the branches where we work with brac. And then finally, and perhaps you saw this coming, only the poor do the casual jobs. So these four bars represent the share of hours devoted to to the three things, the blue, the red and the green and the other by the ultra poor, then the neo poor, then the middle classes, and then the upper class. And you see that the upper class would never go close to work as a casual laborer. They only do livestock rearing. And the only people who do casual labor are the ultra poor. So poverty is intrinsically linked with job choice. And the poor do jobs which are paid less. And one thing that you can't see from these graphs are much more irregular. That's what casual means. It means that you show one day at the market and you see if somebody needs help harvesting their fields. If they do, you go work. If they don't, you go home and you haven't worked for the day. And so if you look at the number of days that they work in these occupations is on average 120. So four months of the year they work. The remaining eight months they are underemployed or unemployed altogether. Now, the question is obviously why? Why do we observe this? And one possibility that BRAC relies the program on is that these people are trapped in a poverty trap. And you can start at any point in the circle. That's why it's a trap. It reinforces itself. But I'll start from the top. This is a situation in which the poor have no productive assets that is no livestock. Because of this, they can only do casual jobs. These casual jobs pay little and are available only some months of the the year or some days of the month. This means that they have low income. And because they have low income, they can't afford more productive assets and they can't get out of this vicious circle. And that's what BRAC tries to do. And I'm not going to go into the details of the program because Anna has already explained them to you, but the idea behind the program is precisely to break the trap. How do they break the trap? Well, they give them a productive asset. The productive asset is extremely valuable, especially relative to the situation of the Ultrapura baseline. Back in 2007, when this program started, it was valued at US$140, which might mean nothing to you, but it meant a lot to them. It was one year worth of yearly per capita consumption, it was two years worth of yearly earnings, and it was nine times worth their stock of savings. This was a lot of money. And as Robin said, when we heard about this as economists, we were very skeptical. We said, you're giving them something that's worth a ton relative to what they have. These people are starving. Perhaps the rational response is to go out and sell it immediately and start eating well. Well, if that were the case, they would have been better off in the very short run. They would have had a big meal, but of course their life wouldn't have been transformed. So that's where the evaluation comes into the picture. We decided to collaborate with BRAC to run a randomized control trial by which we assigned 20 branches to treatment. About half of those 1300 villages, 700 and more or less villages to be treated in 2007, and 20 branches in another 700 villages to be kept as controls for four years. So for a period of four years, we have a group that's treated and a group that's controlled. We survey a lot of people. And the bottom line is that we have a sample of about 7,000 beneficiaries and 16,000 people from other wealth classes. You know, they didn't sell the cow. They actually worked with it. And because they worked with it, they changed jobs. So the colors here are the same colors that you saw before. Green is livestock. Redding. And on the vertical axis, you have the number of hours devoted to these jobs. And you see that the green goes up and the blue and the red, they all go down. What that means is that they are changing jobs and their jobs are looking a lot more similar to the jobs of the richer women in the same community. An interesting thing in the dark blue bar there is that total hours worked go up. So they are working more hours, which suggests that at baseline they were probably underemployed, which if you remember, and I'm sure that you remember because you were paying a lot of attention to what I was saying, if you remember what did I say? That these casual jobs are available only rarely. Sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not. On average, they're there one third of the time. So by giving them a cow, you give them a job which is regular and is available every day. And so the hours they devote to work, the labor supply, in economic terms go up the bottom line. Well, it's only the beginning of the story, but the bottom line of this transformation in job choice is that earnings go up. They go up by 37%. Consumption goes up. Not surprisingly, you earn more. You were starving before, now you starve a lot less, which is a great thing. But the true transformation comes from the increase in savings. They not only consume more, they start saving. And now why would they save? Well, let's see what they do with these savings. They go up. There's something really funny that happened with these slides, okay? They go up and buy productive assets. The value of cows go up. That line was supposed to be roughly half the way through the first bar because that line represented the value of the transfer. So of course the values of cows go up. Genius. Brac gave them cows, so obviously they have more. But actually after four years, they have a lot more than Brack gave them originally. And not only cows, they also buy land. Now, if you're in these villages, land is the asset. Only the richer people have land. The ultra poor people, whom a baseline couldn't even afford a goat, now are able to save until the point that they buy land. And they also increase the value of other business assets. My figures were a lot more impressive than this. I don't know why they got all squashed, but believe you me, these are significant effects and they're quite sizable and precisely estimated. Okay, now this doesn't come for free. What? I told you it costed $300 per household. If you translate it into purchasing power parity, it's about $1,300. So you want to compare how much are the benefits relative to the cost. And of course, the scale should go the other way around. I don't understand what happened to this presentation. But look at the numbers. I know I have my theories, but I shall not share them with you the benefits are a lot higher than the cost, regardless of what the CISO is telling you, 7360 is a lot less than 1363. Now, to do this calculation, what we use is an assumption that whatever gain they had after four years would last forever. This, you might say, is a heroic assumption. So what about the opposite? What happens if the gains disappear after four years? Well, if the gains disappear after four years, the program barely breaks even. So the truth you might think might lie in between 0 and 5.4. Well, that depends, because there could be even more optimistic state of the world, which is one in which actually things get better over time. And that's what I'll do in the rest of the presentation. This is, oh my goodness. For the financially minded among you, this was an estimate of the internal rate of return, which is 22%, which is higher than the opportunity cost of funds. That is, if BRAC had taken this money and instead of giving them to the ultra poor, they would have put them in the bank, they would have earned about 5% a year and they could have paid the ultra poor 5% a year. If they give them cows and training and all the rest, they earn 22% a year, regardless of what the slide says. Okay, so now I don't dare think what's going to happen to these slides because these were my most ambitious slides. But I can tell you in words, if the graphs come all silly, I'll tell in words. So as I told you, see, my important to understand what happens in the very long run. And so we came back on the field with BRAC seven years later. After seven years, some of the controls had been treated. So I won't show you control versus treatment. I'll show you the treatment, where it goes and then a counterfactual estimate of where the control would have been. And let's see what happens. That's not looking good already. So this was expenditure on non durables. That's the effect. Okay, so you see where it's going. The first bit is the change after two years. The second bit is the change after four years. Always yearly changes. So we're always comparing change one year to the next. Okay, the third bit is the change after seven years. So if you compare yearly expenditure in 2014 to yearly expenditure in 2007, the increase is way larger than the corresponding increase with respect to 2011 or with respect to 2009. So all those calculations that we were doing on the cost benefit analysis, thinking that we were heroic in assuming that the four year Benefits will continue in the future. Actually turned out to be probably underestimates because the effects after seven years are much larger and definitely much larger than it looks in that graph. But what can we do? This is expenditure on durables. So before it was non durables, food, electricity and the like. Everything that you consume and is gone durables. You know, the things like tv, a sewing machine and the like. The expenditures on durables also increases. Productive assets go up. Same thing. They go up after seven years as much as they go up after four years. And perhaps the most impressive of all productive assets, although not so impressive in this graph, is access to land. I told you, land is the productive assets for excellence in these communities. And at baseline, about 1 out of 10 ultra poor had any access to land by renting, not even buying. After seven years, we are up to more than four out of 10. So it's a massive transformation. Transformation in their asset position. So what do we. I'm sorry, this was a beautiful graph. It's not going to be so beautiful anymore. Let's see, let's see. Let's have trust. So that was the poverty trap, right? I want to conclude from where I began. I began with this poverty trap that the ultra poor were in and Braak's attempt at killing this poverty trap. And the way that BRAC tried to do that was by. That was supposed to be on the. No, obviously now it's no assets. It was supposed to be productive. Okay, okay. This is better. Okay. They were only doing only casual jobs. Now they combine labor with assets in small businesses. Okay. Before they had low pay and low demand. Now they have higher hourly pay and they have regular employees. This means that their income is now higher. And guess what they can do with this income? They can accumulate more assets. And now what was a vicious circle becomes a vicious circle where things get better and better year after year. So the conclusion is that there was a poverty trap. BRAC succeeded in breaking it. And this was a great success indeed.
- [68:32]
A
Thank you. Thank you very much, Orianna. So we're going to have to. I think the minister needs to take his leave. So thank you very much for coming. I'd now like to welcome Esther Duflo from MIT to the stage.
- [68:50]
G
I wonder whether I should tell Mr. Hon. Minister that he cannot possibly leave a rehearsed for a very long time. And I was really looking forward for that time. Okay, I'm going to be very quick. I'm standing between you and questions and dinner and there is no minister anyway. So I will be Very rapid. I'm going to pick up exactly where Arianna left it and give us this really amazing result of the impact evolution of brac. But one question you could ask. Okay, so this is a general problem. It was not just her. I was like, she's not prepared. I'm not from black and I had nice colors and all that on my slides. But it doesn't matter. Any woman associated with with the BRAC organization is powerful and doesn't let anything stop them. Okay, so three questions from the BRAC evolution. One is, is it BRAC's magic touch? Well, if it was BRAC mentioned, it would be good enough because they are reaching already millions of people and so we would learn something interesting. But is it about the program? Can other people implement the same program? That's a very important question. If we are thinking about scaling up beyond one organization, beyond Bangladesh. Secondly, is, is the entire package worth the high cost and is the entire package even necessary? Third, what are the long term impacts? And Oriana already told us some about the long term impact. I'm going to be very quick on that because it's similar results from elsewhere. First question, does it replicate elsewhere? How do we find out? Well, by running evaluations in other places. So thanks to CGAP and the Ford foundation and IPA led by Dean Carlin and BRAC who provided technical assistance with a bunch of partners, similar evaluations, randomized evaluations of a BRAC like program, graduation program were conducted in all of these countries around the world. We know it's a real BRAC like program because there were regular V visits, Riverside visit from Braque to the site, from the site to brac and meetings in Paris or other places where people exchange notes. So of course the program is adapted in every place as it should be to suit to local conditions. For example, guinea pigs are assets in Peru and they are not present in Bangladesh, I don't think. But other than that, it's the same philosophy with the same basic component. What does the evaluation show? The evaluation shows that basically the results that you're finding for the BRAAC evaluation, you're going to have to take me on my words, given what happened to the slide. But the impact of the programs are very similar in all of the sites except with the possible exception of Honduras as we find them to be in brac. So the assets go up in every site. The income and revenue go up as a result in every site. You can see, or you could possibly see some variation from site to site, but the point is that it's Generally going up in countries after countries. Per capita consumption as a result is going up as well. And food security which is is the ability to feed your family every single meal of the day is also going up in every site. Even in Honduras where we don't see an overall increase in consumption, we do see an overall increase in food security. So even in Honduras, the poorest of the poor seem to have gotten something out of this. Financial inclusion go up and mental health go up. Your ability. This is measured both by self reported happiness but but also by an internationally validated scale on depression that is used in all of the sites. And physical health is a bit more, varies a bit more from site to site. Basically there is much less of an effect at this point. Women empowerment also at this point varies a lot more from side to side. Although overall we do find an increase in index of women empowerment. There was a discussion in the presentation by Min about the involvement about inclusion in the village and that is measured by an overall impact measure on political involvement. This is not about running for president. This is typically about being involved in the day to day running of your village. And we tend to see an improvement both in the pool results and overall for most countries in political involvement of the beneficiaries. These again I repeat, are all made of comparisons of either people randomly selected to receive or not receive within the program or villages where some people were selected to villages where the program was in place or was not in place. So this is, this is very robust, very solid result. So does it replicate elsewhere or is it Braak's magic totes? It is not Braak's magicots. It's important to know that these organizations were not that special. I mean they were special in a sense, they agreed to participate. But otherwise one of the most successful replication is in Ethiopia which is run by the government Pakistan as another very successful replication is run by dozens of different NGOs, some of them very tiny. So there is nothing about these organizations that it's a bunch of elite people, particularly competent people. The fact is through these training manuals to these cross visits, Braq was able to replicate their formulas with you and me. I mean I'm sure you would be very good but with the normal, a normal set of people. So that is very encouraging about the ability of such a program to be scaled up. Someone mentioned earlier that we are the proof of concept stage. In my view, this type of result tells us we are way past the proof of concept stage. This is something that this is a formula. I'm not saying this is the beginning and the end of every single result, solving any single problem of the world. But what it does, it does well and it does in several countries with several types of people. And therefore we can be reasonably confident that this particular formula can be replicated. Now, I showed you a bunch of results, but of course it cost a bunch of money. And the question is, was it worth the high cost? We already saw, we would have seen, if the slide didn't go backwards, that it was the high cost, it was worth the high cost for Bangladesh. Does it also apply in those replications? So on average it does if you accept Honduras, where the cost benefit calculation is based on increasing consumption uniquely. So this, by the way, is a lower bound because it doesn't value any of the other benefits that I also saw, such as mental health, participation in political institutions and the like. But if we're looking at just consumption effect and we don't value the assets per se, but the way we see rate of returns that are in Ethiopia, 200%, in India, something like 400%, that is assuming a slow decay in the impact, very much like Oriana assumed for Bangladesh. Now, so this means something that is something that more than pays for itself. So this is something you can replicate. And this is something that if you replicate, it more than pays for itself. In term, of course, of the social benefits. It's not that you can go back to these people and ask for their money back, but still the question becomes, well, it pays for itself. Is it still the most? Is it still the. Is it still the most, the best thing you could have done? And in particular, are there ways to strip down, you saw both in the video and in the steps, the number of things that are involved in this package and something that is in most of the sites, the direct transfer to the household in terms of the value of the asset plus the stipend is only about a half of the overall cost of the program. So a very natural question that people usually bounce at us if it has not arisen before is, look, you have all these personal costs on top of it to run the meetings and the advice and this and that. Do you really need all of that component? Because that money is not something that goes to the poor, it's something that is just spent in personnel who could be doing something else. So this is a true cost, as opposed to the asset transfer, which is a fiscal cost, but not a true cost. So then the question naturally is, ok, can you strip it down to just the value of the assets, for example, and for that we can't answer this question from this series of evaluation alone because this is a set of packages. So can we answer it by looking at. So what we need is another evaluation or really ideally several other evolution where we trying the component separately. So for example this, this morning was presenting something about Pakistan but very short term results so far comparing just giving cash to doing the full version of the program. Another program which are results that are a little bit more advanced is the Ghana program that I showed you. I showed you the result of the straight ultra poor program which has the whole component but in some other villages that did what they call very poetically a goat drop. And this morning it was even a liquid go which makes it even more complicated. A good drop is simply a situation where I give you the cow and that's it, you're free to do whatever you want with it. You won't get any particular support to take care of it. So it's of course much cheaper to administer. And the bottom line is that if you give people goods after one year they have goods. That's kind of reassuring. But when it's not given they could have made a mesh re like very early on and then you did no good. But right after end line they still have the goods but that's it. There's no improvement in their, believe me on what this is income and revenues, consumption or other assets. Basically when you give people just a good, they have more goods but they don't seem to be able to generate substantial changes in the revenue with it. So this one evidence from Ghana suggests that BRAC has a complete approach which seems to be what is needed in this case. The asset alone doesn't just do it. Finally, what are the long term impacts of the entire package? The long term impacts are absolutely essential both from the cost benefit point of view because if the results only last a year then it's really not worth the high cost. And because this is a program which is meant to eradicate poverty and eradicate poverty is not about eradicate poverty over one year, it's about eradicating poverty forever. So it's really an idea of a big push at the level of the individual, of the household, a big push and say ok, now that I've taken you out, you're on this different trajectory as the poverty trap cycle clearly put. So we've seen in Bangladesh that it seems to be the case when we are looking at the seven year old result we're thinking results that do not decline and only increase. I'm just Going to show you very briefly one more data point for India where we also have seven year results. The very similar timeline as the Bangladesh result. The result came out in February, we started in February 07 and we conducted a seven year end line in January 2014. You need to believe me. Okay, I'm not even going to try to show you that all the effect grow but you don't know because somehow the color went away. Well, you can kind of know if you can read very carefully. The effects are in numbers over here. So EL1 is blue, that's immediately after the end of the program. EL2 is one year later, EL3 is in white afterwards. And you can see that all of the L3 numbers are larger. Larger effect on per capita consumption. Larger effect on household house asset index. Larger effect on food security. The only place where we don't have a larger effect is on borrowing, which is not necessarily a bad thing because most of the borrowing that goes down in informal sources. Larger effect on total savings. Similar effect on time spent working. Larger effect on physical health. Larger effect on mental health. So very much the same as what Orianna told us. This is based on comparing people who initially got the program haven't been touched by bandan forever. Bandan is not even in those villages anymore to people who stayed in the comparison group. So to conclusion, does it replicate elsewhere or is it black magic touch? Yes, it does replicate. It's a true policy innovation. It's not just a great organization, it's a policy innovation super public good that is here for us to use. Is it an entire package worth the high cost? Yes, it is. Is it necessary Provisionally? That's the conclusion I think. What are the long term impact? The larger impact over the long run than over the short and medium run. So what do we need to do next? Well, I think we need to go and scale up. I'm a researcher thinking scaling up, researching is what I like to do. But I think we can hit the pause button on research if needed and move ahead. But of course we need to learn as we scale different actors, governments as organization, different models potentially continue to try out different versions. Maybe it's possible to lower the costs even while keeping the overall philosophy of the program the same. Understand the mechanism of the unlocking of the poverty crab better. That might be our job or it might be the job of the partners on the field combined with us. And then a final thing is heterogeneity. Despite the name targeting the ultra poor program, the poorest of the poor still benefit for the program. But in graph I didn't attempt to show you, which I'm glad I didn't, it actually benefit less than the rest of the poor. So the question is why? And the question is it possible to design the program to change even the change, further, refine the program or invent a new thing, a new kind of support for these households specifically so that they can join the bandwagon and get the largest effect as well? Thank you very much.
- [84:31]
A
Okay, so we're nearly out of time, but I just wanted to say two things. One is that which wasn't mentioned in because of course the big challenge is going to be to get this idea into government. And so that's what we've been spending much of the day. But what I suggest is there's just a couple of burning questions that people want to ask. There's a tradition at the LSC that people should be allowed to ask questions. And our time is nearly done. So I'm going to take three questions and then I'm going to close it and have the panel respond. So there's two very burning questions in the middle and I see a third at the top. So it's the beginning in the. Yeah.
- [85:10]
F
Hi. Thank you all so much for your talks. My question is for Esther. Why do you think the cost benefit was so much lower in Honduras and why do you think it was so much higher in India? Was it because the NGOs were more competent? Was it because it was a similar context as Bangladesh? What made it so successful there when.
- [85:29]
G
OJ application and what didn't work in Honduras?
- [85:34]
H
Evening. My name is Francisco. I am an MPA student, student of Professor Bandera. I wanted to ask kind of like a mixed question for Brack and then for Professor Duflo and Bandera. First, Brack is the social enterprise, one of the biggest ones. You show how you can be sustainable being an NGO and not depend on donations. Do you think this program can be sustainable? Sustainable economically for other smaller social enterprises to apply, not necessarily having to just spend? Because obviously in the cost benefit analysis, it's beneficial but not sustainable. It's like spending and then it does good, it's worth it. But could we make it self sustainable economically? And then for the professors, do you think that we can apply this for urban poverty and not just necessarily rural in the sense of there's almost 1 billion people living in slums. How could we translate these results into urban poverty? Thank you.
- [86:28]
A
Then the gentleman at the back.
- [86:35]
C
A slight repeat of the last pit is, are there no urban Ultra poor. And if so, how did they go out? But also how does this affect, say, the refugees that are likely to come from climate change in Bangladesh? Is it just going to get them all ready to move abroad or move to Dhaka?
- [86:50]
A
Thanks. Okay, so if the panel could pick up whichever one of these they want.
- [86:56]
G
Should I answer the first one?
- [86:57]
A
Yeah.
- [86:59]
G
So we enter the realm of speculation slightly when we, when we compare results from only seven places, especially since we have no hypothesis experts. So there could be more explanations than data point. So I'll give you an anecdotal data point, which is Honduras people gave chicken and the chicken died of chicken flu or whatever chicken died of. So that's kind of what happened. So what you see is In N line 1, you actually do see improvement in consumption because the chicken were still there. And then by n line 1 and n line 2, the chicken meet their demise and it goes away. So that's the anecdote. Now related to the other question, A less anecdotal thing is if you plotted the impact of the program against the level of poverty rate in the country or gdp, you would find roughly that the effects are larger in the poorest places and then at the same time the cost tend to be smaller in the poorest places, except when they become really poor. In Africa, et cetera, where you have labor can be expensive. But this is where India and Bangladesh are a super sweet sweet spot. Lots of very, very poor people. And you can, and the costs are not very, are the lowest to run the program. So I think that's sort of why you get, you know, the largest effect in largest effect are in Ethiopia, Ghana and India. And the lowest cost are India. So India wins the cost benefit analysis. On the urban question, there are urban entrepreneurs, it turns out there even are urban entrepreneurs programs, but they were not part of this set of evaluations yet. In fact, early in the process we thought we could do some urban stuff with Band then, but it didn't happen. And this is something that definitely many of us are very interested in in studying the impact of similar programs for the ultra poor, you're less likely to give cows and more likely to give a little capital to run a business. On the sustainability question, I think in a sense it's the, I'm not sure it's the right question. It doesn't matter that this particular program is not financially sustainable, both for equity reasons. We don't think it's right that there is anybody who live on their extreme poverties. The world is willing to redistribute resources to them. The question is, can we do it effectively? And this shows that we can do it effectively in this way. In the same way you never ask whether an immunization program should be cost effective or at least I wouldn't like to ask this question. We don't care. We would be willing to pay people to get immunized because it has a lot of externalities in this way. There might be externalities such as migration and stuff like that that were mentioned. They might also. But quite aside from that, we just think as a world, as the SDG have shown, that this kind of poverty is intolerable and we are willing to pay to get rid of it.
- [90:04]
A
Thank you. Mohammad, you want to. Sorry, Anna.
- [90:10]
D
Yeah, I wanted to respond to the question around climate change. Yes, in our program, we do operate our program in the climate resilient area. And while we actually provide them climate resilient livelihood and also along the program, we provide them education, especially the disaster prepared at education. And also we encourage them the homestead gardening. And while we say about the climate change education or disaster preparedness education, it is not only provided to our target population, it is we provide it to the whole community so that the whole community is prepared to face these challenges. This is one. And in terms of sustainability, I think that yes, it is sustainable as far as we have implemented the program, but financial sustainability definitely is a safety net program. So it needs to continue to address this extreme poverty.
- [91:24]
A
Mohammed, do you want to. Okay, I think we're out of time, so I'd just like to end this by thanking Mushtaq Chowdhury and the panel for their presentations.