Targeting the ultra poor in Bangladesh, household survey 2014

Burgess, Robin (2020). Targeting the ultra poor in Bangladesh, household survey 2014. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-854138

The world's poorest people typically lack both capital and skills. They tend to work as in occupations such as agricultural labor or subsistence cultivation which are often insecure and seasonal in nature and which do not require capital or skills. The non-poor, in contrast, tend to be engaged in secure wage employment or to operate their own businesses. Consequently, most anti-poverty programs attempt to target the poor to help them overcome either a lack of capital and or skills. Notable policy interventions along these lines include microfinance programs on the capital side, or vocational training and adult education on the skills side. Yet it is uncertain whether many of these programs are, in fact, able to transform the occupational choices of the poor, and thereby enable them to permanently exit poverty. Occupational change is central to development and growth, but it is the result of a complex set of interactions between individuals, markets and the state, and it is therefore difficult to credibly link occupational change to a lack of capital and skills.
The proposed research thus speaks directly to the first overarching question posed in the ESRC-DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research 2012-13 on finding effective means to allow the poorest to exit and stay out of poverty. It also addresses directly the crosscutting issues on structural inequalities (particularly as regards gender) and measurement and metrics (particularly as regards measuring empowerment and the social dynamics and general equilibrium effects induced by the program). The interventions we examine are fundamentally about empowering the poorest women within rural communities both socially and economically so that they can exit and stay out of poverty. The proposed research evaluates an on-going large randomized evaluation of the ultra poor program which is being carried out jointly by the Principal Investigator, Professor Robin Burgess, and the world's largest NGO, BRAC (Bandiera et al, 2012).

Data description (abstract)

A household survey of a randomized control trial in rural Bangladesh conducted in 2014 which collected data on the long-run outcomes of the Targeting the Ultra Poor program conducted by the NGO BRAC. This survey is the 7 year follow-up.
The research examines a new set of interventions, pioneered by the world's largest NGO BRAC in Bangladesh, which simultaneously tackle the capital and skills constraint in an attempt to encourage occupational change amongst the world's poorest women. We use randomised control trials of this type of program in Bangladesh to look at whether providing capital and skills can encourage basic entrepreneurship. The issue at hand is whether one can create successful female entrepreneurs - who acquire skills and make use of productive capital - out of poor women who started out with neither. Key to this question is whether asset and skill transfers can induce the poor to alter their occupational choices and permanently exit poverty, as opposed to simply enabling them to increase their consumption in the short term. These questions are highly salient as the world is littered with examples of anti-poverty programs, which despite their best intentions, fail to have any appreciable impact on their intended beneficiaries.

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