Poverty Alleviation Coalition

Many displaced people live in extreme poverty. The most vulnerable among them are so poor that they can’t engage in activities from most regular livelihood programmes. They are also short of basic know-how and lack confidence in their abilities. All this makes escaping extreme poverty even harder. 
 
In response to this global poverty situation among refugees and in line with the Global Compact on Refugees, UNHCR formed a global coalition with the World Bank Partnership for Economic Inclusion and 16 NGO partners: 

AVSI, BOMA Project, BRAC, Caritas Switzerland, Concern Worldwide, Danish Refugee Council (DRC), Fundacion Capital, GOAL, HIAS, Innovation for Poverty Action (IPA), Mercy Corps, Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative (RSRI), Trickle Up, Village Enterprise and World Vision. 

This Coalition aims to alleviate poverty, particularly among vulnerable refugees and host communities, by offering a personalized response to individual needs. The Coalition is uniquely put together and able to combine forces of humanitarian and development actors with complementary expertise: 

1. Members with proven technical experience in poverty alleviation programming; 

2. Members with a solid and wide presence in developing and refugee-hosting countries and 

3. International and intergovernmental organizations can mobilize the political will and financial support required for an impactful response to the poverty situation of refugees and host communities. 

The Coalition uses a well-proven poverty alleviation model: The Graduation Approach. The model has been extensively used in the development community and, as noted by the Economist, is one of the few poverty alleviation strategies that works consistently across countries, cultures and conditions. 

The approach was pioneered by the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee in 2002 with a success rate of 75% in poverty graduation. It has since been tested in over 15 countries, including ten refugee situations. 

At the 2023 Global Refugee Forum, the Poverty Alleviation Coalition has pledged to implement programmes using the Graduation Approach to alleviate poverty among 190,000 displacement-affected and host community households in over 35 countries in the regions of Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East between 2024 and 2027. To this day, the Coalition has reached more than 123,000 displacement-affected and host community households since the 2019 Global Refugee Forum and is planning to reach 350,000 households by 2027.