Important development programmes such as microfinance often do not reach the very poorest households. A new set of initiatives, called Graduation programmes, have targeted these very poor households. Their objective is to graduate them out of poverty in a sustainable manner and make them resilient so they do not fall back into poverty. Most of these programmes target women and use some form of asset transfer, and perhaps stipends for a fixed period. In addition to this material support they often help clients to strengthen their social network. Typically, programmes expect to work with clients for two years before they are ready to graduate. In addition some programmes provide psychological support to these poor women who are often marginalised socially and often have very little confidence to engage even in petty business. But not all programmes include this component. The question is should they? How important is psychological support such as life planning, confidence building and strengthening social awareness in helping poor women to graduate in a resilient way? Surprisingly, no research has actually addressed this question. It is a development frontier and we do not know for sure what the answer is. This research is stage two of a project seeking to answer this question. In stage one, the research team adopted a well-known model of psychological wellbeing and tested it on a sample of women from a BRAC programme called 'Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction: Targeting the Ultra-Poor' (CFPR-TUP) There has been a lot of economic and social research on this programme and almost all the evidence shows that it is effective in bringing poor women and their households out of poverty and that is also efficient in terms of cost. However none of this research has really focused on the relative importance of the different inputs -material, social and psychological. In particular the psychological dimension has had no research. We do not know whether these softer inputs provided through informal counselling and through confidence building workshops make any difference. The stage one research took advantage of a large data set that has been collected over four rounds since 2007 on economic and social dimensions of change in client households. It also generated a new set of client data giving them scores on the psychological model because there is not any existing data to work with. The researchers first of all used statistical routines to explore the psychological wellbeing model with this new data. It then compared psychological wellbeing scores with scores on income and other dimensions of material progress. It established that three key dimensions of psychological wellbeing are closely associated with material improvement. It also showed that, compared to a control group, members of the programme performed better in two out of three of these dimensions. Stage two research will seek to validate these findings by testing them across a fresh sample taken from three different programmes seeking to reduce extreme poverty. The research will refine the existing questionnaire based upon methods used in social psychology. The questionnaire will be canvassed with 1,800 households across the three programmes, only one of which provides psychological support and for all of which matching socio-economic data is available. After collecting this new data, the researchers will run a series of statistical tests focusing on whether the programme providing psychological inputs performs better or not. Together with the socio-economic data, this new data will help establish whether psychological support to poor clients is adding value by strengthening or speeding up progress out of poverty. The results will be shared with groups of the clients to provide some ground-truthing of the analytic findings. The results will then also be shared broadly within the national and international development community.

Important development programmes such as microfinance often do not reach the very poorest households. A new set of initiatives, called Graduation programmes, have targeted these very poor households. Their objective is to graduate them out of poverty in a sustainable manner and make them resilient so they do not fall back into poverty. The main approach is to develop the income earning of households through microenterprise, usually more than one. Most of these programmes target women and use some form of asset transfer or asset subsidy, and perhaps stipends for a fixed period. In addition to this material support they often help clients to strengthen their social network and get the community involved in supporting their clients in working towards resilient graduation out of poverty. Typically programmes expect to work with clients for two years before they are ready to graduate. In addition some programmes provide psychological support to these poor women who are often marginalised socially and often have very little confidence to engage even in petty business. Bu not all programmes include this component. The question is should they? How important is psychological support such as life planning, confidence building and strengthening social awareness in helping poor women to graduate in a resilient way? Surprisingly, no research has actually addressed this question. It is a development frontier and we do not know for sure what the answer is. This research will address this question through research on the first and biggest graduation programme which is in Bangladesh and run by an NGO called BRAC. Their programme is called 'Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction' (CFPR) and it has graduated over 400,000 ultra poor women since it started in 2002. This programme provides material, social and psychological support. There has been a lot of economic and social research on this programme and almost all the evidence shows that it is effective in bringing poor women and their households out of poverty and that is also efficient in terms of cost. However none of this research has really focused on the relative importance of the different inputs -material social and psychological. In particular the psychological dimension has had no research. We do not know whether these softer inputs provided through informal counselling and through confidence building workshops make any difference. The research will take advantage of a large data set that has been collected over four rounds since 2002 on economic and social dimensions of change in client households. But it will generate a new set of data, on the psychological support provided because there is not any existing data to work with. The research will refine an existing questionnaire based upon methods used in social psychology and canvass it with 1000 households that also took part in the four rounds of economic and social data collection. Half of these were in the CFPR and half are a control group who did not receive programme benefits but are also very poor. The questionnaire will be carefully field-tested before use. After collecting this new data the researchers will run a series of statistical tests to try and establish which components of the programme contribute most. It will focus especially on the question of whether the psychological inputs are adding value by strengthening or speeding up progress out of poverty. The results will be shared with groups of the clients to provide some ground-truthing of the analytic findings. The results will also be shared broadly within the national and international development community.

Education is central to economic development and recognised as the Second Goal of the UN Millennium Development Goals. Many developing countries, including Bangladesh, which is the focus country of this project, have achieved impressive progress in primary school enrolment; however, there is evidence that the effectiveness of primary education is low in many cases. While Bangladesh has adopted various policy measures to improve incentives to attend primary school, there are still severe problems with low completion rates. Furthermore, poor cognitive skills are found among those who have completed primary education. Our project sets out to investigate the impact of several novel programs targeting both pre-school children and their parents, with the goal of improving both short- and long-term outcomes of rural children in Bangladesh. Past research, such as that on the Perry Preschool Program, has demonstrated that the return to investment in high quality childhood education is substantial and that this is especially true for families from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, the vast majority of these programs are currently found in developed countries and it is uncertain whether these types of intensive programs can be effectively run in a poor developing country. Other research has shown that parenting skills are potentially as crucial as formal early life educational programs for child development. Again, this evidence is mainly from developed countries and no research has examined if this is true in the context of developing countries where many poor families have limited education themselves. Recent work has also shown that parental stress is a particularly important impediment to investments in children among the poor. Some researchers have argued that other investments, such as those in formal education, are unlikely to have benefits if parents are constantly worried about day-to-day stressors. This project will use a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the efficacy of four interventions designed to improve child outcomes in Bangladesh. In collaboration with the BRAC, we will develop the Bangladesh rural early childhood centre (BRECC). This centre will have many commonalities with the Chicago Heights Early Childhood Centre (CHECC) project that was successfully carried out in low-income areas of Chicago, IL between 2010 and 2014. The first intervention will establish a pre-school program that aims to prepare pre-primary students for formal school and provide them with the skills needed to succeed in life. The second intervention will also set up a 'Parent Academy' which will consist of a series of interactive workshops designed to assist parents in supplementing their child's school learning. The third intervention will provide them with monthly cash transfers in order to reduce the stress that these families face in dealing with unforeseen events and allow them to focus more on investing in their children. The fourth intervention will combine all three interventions to understand the role, relative efficacy and cost-effectiveness of each of the interventions. These interventions will be designed so we can measure their impacts on a wide variety of outcomes including child health, cognitive development and non-cognitive skills (e.g., personality). Testing will be used to measure cognitive skills. We will also carefully measure the costs of each intervention so we can properly estimate the most efficient use of resources. The field component of the project will be run by BRAC, one local researcher from the University of Dhaka, and research assistants and field staffs. The main program will be implemented over a two-year period in 200 randomly selected villages, with the intention of follow-up to measure the long-term consequences of the four interventions. We will survey around 6,000 children and their parents from these villages and the resultant database will be one of a kind for developing countries.