Challenges of Measuring Graduation in Rwanda

Rwanda demonstrates how a process of community consultation and participation is able to identify and rank community members according to ‘social poverty’, drawing on the Ubudehe tradition which is considered a strength of Rwanda's social fabric. However, with the Ubudehe categorisation now the basis for determining eligibility to a range of social benefits, the process has come under some strain. This article highlights two issues related to targeting and graduation: (1) the difficulty in identifying the poor/non?poor and ranking the population using community participatory techniques; and (2) the sensitivity of eligibility criteria and graduation thresholds to different targeting modalities. Our primary interest is to establish whether improvements for identifying the poor and non?poor can be made without undermining community ownership and what these improvements would look like. This will be useful for policymakers in Rwanda as the new five?year development strategy places importance on graduating households out of extreme poverty.