The Chars Livelihoods Programme in Bangladesh: Factors that Enable, Constrain and Sustain Graduation

The Chars Livelihoods Programme (CLP) in Bangladesh aims to lift households out of extreme poverty by providing a comprehensive package of support. As with other poverty reduction programmes in Bangladesh, CLP's success is partly judged using the concept of graduation. Defining graduation and how to actually measure it has generated significant debate. This article, prepared by members of the team responsible for implementing the programme, explains how CLP's thinking in terms of defining and measuring graduation has evolved over time. The programme finally arrived at an agreed set of graduation criteria and a measurement methodology in early 2014. This article presents graduation rates. It goes on to outline the factors that constrain and enable graduation and offers a set of conclusions and lessons learned, including the need to ensure alignment between programme design, operations and graduation criteria; and ensuring that sustainability of impacts/graduation is monitored and evaluated.