MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
There's a tried-and-true program that helps people get out of extreme poverty. It's typically implemented in rural communities across many low-income countries. New research shows it works even under incredibly difficult circumstances, as NPR's Fatma Tanis explains.
FATMA TANIS, BYLINE: In Baidoa, many people are in a tough situation. The southwestern Somalian city has a population of over 1.2 million people. About half of them are internally displaced, driven from their homes due to extreme drought and violence by the militant group, Al-Shabaab. Jessica Leight is a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
JESSICA LEIGHT: They're living in particularly challenging conditions with very limited access to services, often very low levels of human capital, still facing violence.
TANIS: The lack of security and infrastructure in the country overall has made it really difficult for organizations to help them. Starting in 2021, until it was dismantled, the U.S. Agency for International Development funded what's known as the graduation method that helps push people out of extreme poverty. It has a high success rate based on a number of studies. Leight is the lead author on the study of the Somalia intervention.
LEIGHT: Most graduation programs include some cash support, some help to generate an income, usually assets or training, and some encouragement to save.
TANIS: Around 5,000 households in Baidoa received six monthly unconditional cash transfers, each valued at $42.50. They also got coaching from the aid group that ran it, World Vision, on how to build a business. Households were then given the option to receive either a one-time asset transfer - that could be cash, about $370, or livestock like goats - or they could enroll in a six-month vocational training course.
LEIGHT: Among the roughly half of households who chose assets, they overwhelmingly chose goats.
TANIS: The program ended in 2025, and Leight and her research team continued to collect data for two years and recently released their final findings.
LEIGHT: The surprise is that the findings are less different than we expected. So we often think that, you know, displaced populations face really intractable challenges, and that's true. At the same time, for this displaced population, an intervention very similar to what's been effective elsewhere was very effective.
TANIS: Sixty-eight percent of participating households are now earning more. They're able to feed their children and send them to school. For example, a 70-year-old woman chose to receive five goats as her asset and then was able to increase them to a herd of 15. Her family can now drink fresh milk. She makes and sells butter, increasing her income up to $50 a month. Dean Karlan is an economist and expert on poverty interventions at Northwestern University. He was not involved in the study.
DEAN KARLAN: The biggest, most influential part of this work was in showing that, like, even in Somalia, this worked and just it changed lives in really remarkable ways over several years.
TANIS: In fact, Karlan says the results are in the upper end of the spectrum for what the program typically delivers.
KARLAN: When the markets are failing and there's lots of challenges across many different facets, it could very well be that a program like this has a bigger treatment effect because the needs are that much more stark.
TANIS: Researcher Leight says there was an interesting dynamic that really hadn't come out in other studies.
LEIGHT: When we looked at households that benefited the most, we found that it was disproportionately households that had smaller numbers of dependents, so fewer children and elderly.
TANIS: Which she and Karlan say needs further research - Karlan was the chief economist of USAID until it was dismantled. He says the agency had planned $150 million of funding for more of this type of intervention in Somalia, but that all got shut down by the Trump administration last year.
KARLAN: The good news is, though, we have some really good evidence of a way of dealing with a very difficult problem, and that's going to contribute to better policy for others.
TANIS: Even if the U.S. doesn't build on the evidence from this work, Karlan says others will. Fatma Tanis, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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