53 to the individual, with an emphasis on helping each participant find work that aligns with his or her interests and talents and that will generate a sustainable livelihood. When Jema Naik joined Trickle Up’s graduation program, she met other women who intimately understood her struggles and whose fellowship eased her sense of isolation. They boosted her confidence and encouraged her to pursue Trickle Up’s suggestion that she launch a small business. With a grant from Trickle Up of 7,000 rupees (USD $101), Jema opened a small grocery store. Trickle Up also provided technical training and life- skills coaching for Jema because she had no experience managing a business—or setting goals beyond survival. With Trickle Up’s assistance, financial support and the encouragement of her group, Jema has steadily invested in her grocery store and also leased an additional acre of more productive land for cultivation. Jema’s experience with extreme poverty is one that remains common. An estimated 700 million people worldwide still live below the USD $1.90 per day threshold of extreme poverty. Anti-poverty measures, including microcredit and other inclusive-finance interventions, have achieved remarkable successes especially among the economically active poor, but the most extreme poverty is qualitatively different. Extreme poor populations are geographically and socially isolated, and suffer from multiple interlocking and mutually reinforcing issues including ill health, lack of education, lack of communication, transportation or sanitation infrastructure, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness. Beginning in 2002, BRAC in Bangladesh began experimenting with a program that would address the multiple dimensions of extreme poverty. Their work, which came to be known as “Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction/Targeting the Ultra Poor” (or CFPR/TUP), showed promising results and captured the attention of anti-poverty stakeholders worldwide. Two of them, the Ford Foundation and CGAP, teamed up in 2006 to test the graduation methodology. They wanted to know whether CFPR/TUP’s success had something to do with the specific context of Bangladesh (or the renowned organizational prowess of BRAC) or whether, alternatively, the graduation approach would work in different countries with different implementers. They launched 10 pilot programs in eight different countries— one of which was Trickle Up’s program in India—and included a rigorous research and learning agenda. The research results, published in the journal Science among other outlets, found meaningful and lasting gains among graduation participants that were directly attributable to that intervention. Graduation programs were found to have a statistically significant impact on consumption (7.5 percent increase in food consumption), beneficiaries’ productive assets (15 percent increase) and savings (96 percent increase) one year after the program ended (which means three years after the assets were transferred and training was conducted). Impact assessments also show that beneficiaries spent more time working, went hungry on fewer days, experienced lower levels of stress and reported improved physical health. New results from one of the CGAP/Ford Foundation sites in India six years after the program revealed even greater impact, with a doubling in per capita consumption compared with the three-year mark. When MetLife Foundation decided in 2013 to focus our strategy on financial inclusion, the graduation approach was a natural fit. It builds the financial capability of a population—the extreme poor—who otherwise would likely remain outside the formal financial system altogether. MetLife Foundation support has helped Trickle Up replicate success stories like Jema Naik’s for the past four years. We have made USD $1.59 million in grants to Trickle Up for programs in the United States and Mexico as well as to the graduation programs in India which remain ongoing. Trickle Up graduation programming in India, in fact, has captured the attention of the Indian government, which has long been interested in effective responses to the most extreme poverty. The government has asked Trickle Up to expand into three more Indian states and has pledged significant additional resources. Government involvement, in fact, is likely the future of the graduation approach. If the early CFPR/TUP work in Bangladesh proved that the graduation approach is effective, and the CGAP/Ford Foundation pilots proved it could work in other countries with other implementers, then the question since those pilots ended in 2014 has become this: How can graduation achieve a scale commensurate with the scale of extreme poverty? The