54 very factors that make graduation so effective—highly personalized, intensive intervention sustained across 18- 36 months—also make it costly. Increasingly, the answer is to embed graduation within government-run social protection programs that already operate at massive scale. Many developing country governments, for example, provide cash transfer programs to their extreme poor citizens. Instead of operating those cash transfer programs in isolation, governments could use them as the channel for the initial, consumption-support step of the graduation approach, and then fold in the asset transfer, technical skills training, financial inclusion and mentorship steps, too. That has been the strategy in Peru, for example, whose graduation program was built on a pre-existing cash transfer platform and has already reached more than 90,000 extreme poor families in the remote mountain and jungle regions of that country. The global pace of graduation programming has accelerated rapidly since the 2014 conclusion of the 10 CGAP/Ford Foundation pilots. At the end of 2016, there were 57 graduation programs up and running, More than one-third (36 percent) of them were government-led and most of those had only been launched since 2015. Forourpart,MetLifeFoundationisexploringthepossibility of expanding our support of the graduation approach into Vietnam and Bangladesh so that more families like Jema Naik’s can start the journey out of extreme poverty and into sustainable livelihoods. Jema’s husband Basanta no longer has to migrate in search of low-wage day labor. Husband and wife now work together in the shop and on theirland,andenjoyraisingtheirdaughtertogether.Injust two years, the family earned 50,727 rupees (USD $737)— more than they dared hope. They have enough food and clothes, their daughter is in school, and with Trickle Up’s help, they enrolled in the Indian government’s health insurance programs. Jema says that opening the shop has changed her life, and says she is committed to helping other women start the climb out of extreme poverty. Based on the available evidence, the graduation approach is one of the most effective strategies devised to date in achieving that goal. View the original article on NextBillion