Ford Foundation - Graduation Approach

The Ford Foundation partnered with the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a global partnership of development organizations housed at the World Bank, to adapt and test the Graduation Approach through 10 pilot projects in eight countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America between 2006 and 2014. While the findings from the CGAP-Ford Foundation pilots were extremely positive, the question of how to operate the Graduation Approach at scale remained. The very factors believed to make it so effective—highly personalized, wrap-around services delivered with compassionate, skilled, and individual attention—also make the “classic” Graduation Approach time- and labor-intensive and costly. CGAP, Ford and their partners then explored how best to support large-scale adaptations and implementations of the Graduation Approach, especially by governments. The results of four of those adaptations are the subject of this series of case studies, published in 2016. Three of the cases (Colombia, Ethiopia and Peru) describe government-led programs; the fourth (India) covers the Graduation work of non-governmental organization (NGO) Bandhan Konnagar.