The NPR episode on “All Things Considered” reports on new research showing that the “graduation” anti-poverty approach—a multifaceted program combining cash transfers, assets, training, and coaching—can be effective even in one of the world’s hardest humanitarian contexts: Baidoa, Somalia, where roughly half the population consists of internally displaced people fleeing drought and conflict.
Jessica Leight, Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI and lead author of the Somalia study, underscores how extreme this context is. She notes that displaced households in Baidoa face severe structural disadvantages, explaining that they live “in particularly challenging conditions with very limited access to services, often very low levels of human capital, still facing violence”. Leight emphasizes the depth of deprivation, adding that “many households don’t even have a single adult who finished primary school”.