A comparative study of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of alternative poverty eradication interventions in extremely poor areas of Northern Ghana

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Our research addresses directly the following overarching question: What factors shape pathways into and out of poverty and people's experience of these, and how can policy create sustained routes out of extreme poverty in ways that can be replicated and scaled up? The study compares the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of alternative poverty eradication projects and assesses their scalability and sustainability. In particular, it answers the following questions:- What is the most effective poverty eradication strategy for an extremely deprived rural area: an integrated development project, a poverty graduation programme, or a cash transfer programme?- Which strategy is more cost-effective at poverty reduction and for what reasons?- What are effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of these strategies once they are scaled up at the national level and implemented over the long term?The study will assess effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of three poverty reduction programmes implemented in deprived areas of Northern Ghana, which share the goal of eradicating poverty over the long term by unlocking poverty traps: 1) the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme implemented by the Government of Ghana, a cash transfer programme targeted to extremely poor households; 2) the SADA-Millennium Village Project implemented by the Earth Institute, consisting of a package of interventions directed to address multiple failures in the health, education and production domains; 3) the BRAC-inspired Poverty graduation programme implemented by local NGOs, which targets the poorest of the poor and provides households with a productive asset grant, cash consumption support, and other services. The research has three main goals. First, we intend to inform choices between alternative poverty eradication programmes. This information will particularly benefit the funders and the implementers of the projects considered, but the lessons learned will have a wider application to similar projects implemented in low-income countries. Second, we intend to make a methodological contribution by developing methods of cost-effectiveness analysis of complex interventions. These methods are currently under-developed and no obvious methodology exist to account for the complexity of the institutional environments, the presence of synergies among different project components, and the presence of economies of scale when interventions are scaled up. Third, we intend to improve our understanding of poverty by investigating the mechanisms underlying extreme poverty and by analysing under what conditions specific interventions can unlock poverty traps. The research will first analyse the effectiveness of the interventions using well-established impact evaluation methodologies relying on rigorous evaluation designs and solid control groups. The analysis will be applied to extraordinarily rich panel household datasets which allow the analysis of poverty over multiple dimensions in addition to standard monetary poverty. The second phase of the research will go beyond the analysis of effectiveness and statistical significance of project effects, by looking at the cost-effectiveness of the interventions. Cost data will be obtained and cost-effectiveness ratios will be calculated for main poverty targets, such as reduction in poverty head-count and malnutrition rates. In a third phase we will assess the scalability and the sustainability of the interventions. To this aim we will extrapolate the effects of the intervention over other geographic areas and over time using novel statistical techniques, and we will simulate different cost structures in the presence of economies of scale and different modalities of project implementation. Simulations, and related sensitivity analyses, will generate impact predictions of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the interventions over the long term and at the national and regional levels.