01| There is no shortage of answers to poverty. Cash, credit, training, clinics, block grants, vouchers, subsidised firms, community meetings — each arrived with a theory, a constituency and a decade of expansion. What is short is the ability to say which of them does anything, and the honest reason is not that nobody has looked. It is that the field has never agreed on what a solution is being asked to do. 02| The usual way of asking is a league table. Models are listed down

01| Give people money and let them decide. The theory of change is that there isn't one — no diagnosis of what the poor lack beyond the obvious thing, no professional standing between the funder and the household, no assumption about what the money should buy. Every other solution in this book part is, implicitly, a claim that this one is insufficient. 02| Two objections have carried the argument against it for forty years. The first is that transfers make people stop working

01| A different instrument to the previous chapter, though it is often filed with it. A one-off capital grant is not income support. It is a lump given once, usually with the expectation that the recipient buys tools, stock or training and converts it into a livelihood. The theory is that the poor are not short of ability or willingness but of the one thing credit markets will not lend them: starting capital. 02| Uganda's Youth Opportunities Program is the best-documented tes

01| Attach conditions to the money: keep the child in school, take her to the clinic, and the transfer continues. The theory is that poor households under-invest in the future because the present is loud, and that a small price attached to future-oriented behaviour corrects it. It is the most exported anti-poverty design of the last thirty years, and the one with the most evaluation behind it. 02| Mexico's Progresa, launched in 1997, was the first national programme of the ty

01| The largest anti-poverty solution in the world is not a programme. It is the ordinary machinery of a state paying pensions, child benefits, unemployment insurance and health cover to its own citizens out of its own budget, forever, without a theory of change or an evaluation attached. It is worth stating the size of it before anything else in this book part is discussed, because everything else is a rounding error against it. 02| In 2023, countries allocated on average 12

01| If a single transfer decays and a single training fails, the obvious response is to stop delivering single things. The graduation approach does exactly that: a productive asset — typically livestock — plus consumption support while the asset matures, plus training, plus regular coaching visits, plus savings encouragement, plus basic health services. Six components, delivered together, over roughly two years, to households in extreme poverty. 02| It was evaluated in six ra

01| This chapter is about one study, because one study did something nobody else did: it followed 6,000 households in extreme poverty for eleven years after a large randomised asset transfer, and asked not whether the transfer worked but for whom it kept working. 02| The answer is the most important finding in this book part. "we identify a threshold level of initial assets above which households accumulate assets, take on better occupations (from casual labor in agriculture

01| Small loans to poor entrepreneurs, mostly women, usually through joint-liability groups, at interest rates well below the moneylender and well above the bank. For two decades microcredit was not one solution among several. It was the solution — a Nobel Peace Prize, a global industry, hundreds of millions of borrowers, and a story simple enough to survive any retelling: the poor are entrepreneurs starved of capital, so lend it to them. 02| Six randomised evaluations, acros

01| Teach people a trade and they will get a job. It is the most intuitive solution in this book part, the most politically popular, and among the least supported by evidence. 02| McKenzie's critical review of active labour market policies in developing countries covers the family: vocational training, wage subsidies, job search assistance, migration assistance. The conclusion is that many of these policies are considerably less effective than policymakers assume, with a larg

01| The best-evidenced employment model in this book part does something the previous chapter's programmes do not. It picks the industry first. 02| The WorkAdvance demonstration screened applicants up front, trained them in the occupational and soft skills of a specific higher-wage sector, and wrapped support services around them through placement and into the job. The earnings gains were substantial and they persisted — in the range of 12 to 34 percent following training, wh

01| Give the money to the community and let it decide what to build. Indonesia's PNPM-Rural is the largest test of that proposition ever run, and it deserves to be examined on its own terms rather than through the sector's usual argument about participation, which is the subject of the next chapter. This one is about the machine. 02| Money arrives as a block grant to a kecamatan, a sub-district of perhaps twenty villages. Under the predecessor programme the grant ran from rou

01| The previous chapter examined the machine. This one examines the claim the machine is built on: that convening people to decide about money durably changes who holds power locally. Not that the road gets built — that part is easy to verify — but that the village governs itself differently afterwards. 02| Casey, Glennerster and Miguel tested it in Sierra Leone with a pre-analysis plan, filed in advance, specifically to stop the researchers cherry-picking from the dozens of

01| Put a trained local person between the health system and the household. She lives in the village, knows the families, visits homes, advises, refers, and sells or supplies basic preventive and curative products. The theory is that the services already exist and the missing element is a person who closes the distance to them. 02| This is the most testable claim in the whole book part, because the role already exists in several fields under other names — community health wor

01| Zimbabwe has roughly ten psychiatrists for a population of about fifteen million. Any solution to common mental disorders that requires a psychiatrist is, in that arithmetic, not a solution. The Friendship Bench started from that constraint rather than from a theory. 02| Lay community health workers — many of them older women, grandmothers, with no clinical credential — deliver structured problem-solving therapy, activity scheduling and peer group support, from benches pl

01| The mirror image of the previous two chapters. The Nurse-Family Partnership sends registered nurses — credentialled professionals, expensive ones — into the homes of first-time low-income mothers, from pregnancy through the child's second year. It has been evaluated in multiple randomised trials across different populations, with effects on parental care, child injuries, subsequent maternal pregnancies, workforce participation and reliance on public assistance, and in the

01| Every other solution in this book part adds something — money, training, an asset, a worker, a road. This one adds nothing. It tells people how their existing services are performing and lets them confront the providers about it. 02| Björkman and Svensson ran a randomised field experiment on community-based monitoring of primary health care in Uganda. Local NGOs convened village meetings and supplied report cards on staff performance, strengthening the community's capacit

01| Two education reforms, both demonstrably effective, both handed to governments to run, both producing nothing. This chapter is about the handover, because the handover turns out to be the intervention. 02| Bold, Kimenyi, Mwabu, Ng'ang'a and Sandefur embedded a randomised trial inside a nationwide Kenyan teacher-hiring reform. Contract teachers — hired on fixed terms outside the civil service — had already shown strong results when an NGO ran the scheme. The trial put the

01| Draw a boundary around a poor area and cut taxes for firms that locate inside it. Jobs follow capital, capital follows incentives, and the residents get work without moving. It is the most politically durable place-based instrument in existence — visible, announceable, cheap to legislate — and it has the weakest record in this book part. 02| Neumark and Simpson's survey of place-based policies covers enterprise zones, EU structural funds and industrial cluster policies. O

01| The same survey that finds enterprise zones decidedly mixed finds something else promising: infrastructure expenditure, and investment in higher education and university research. And the explanation Neumark and Simpson offer for the difference is more useful than the finding itself. 02| These work, in their reading, because of their public-goods character. What is created cannot be captured by a single firm, and does not disappear when the subsidy ends. A road, a water s

01| If where you live determines what your children earn, one solution is to change where you live. Moving to Opportunity is the only randomised test of it: families in high-poverty American public housing were randomly offered vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighbourhoods, with a control group that stayed. 02| Children who moved before age thirteen earned $3,477 more per year in their mid-twenties — 31 percent above a control mean of $11,270 — and were more likely to atte

01| A method, and on the argument of this book part a solution in its own right — because it is the only thing anyone has built that lets two incompatible programmes be compared without first agreeing what good means. 02| The idea is a shortcut around an unsolved theoretical problem. Rather than construct a common unit of human benefit and score everything against it, take the simplest intervention available — handing over money — cost it exactly, and ask whether the programm

01| The other method, and the one the sector actually uses. Choose a common unit of human benefit, estimate how much of it each intervention buys per dollar, rank, and allocate. It is the intellectual foundation of evidence-based philanthropy and of every league table this book part opened by dismissing. It deserves a chapter because it is a genuine attempt at the hardest problem in the field, and because the best available test of it is discouraging in a specific and instruc