The first target of the first SDG proposed by the Open Working Group (OWG) of Member States is to “eradicate
extreme poverty for all people everywhere” by 2030. The second target is to reduce at least by half the proportion of
people living in poverty according to national definitions. These are noble and historic targets for global progress -
they deserve their status at the top of the list. At the same time, they illustrate issues affecting a considerable number
of the 169 development targets proposed by OWG, such as how do we measure them and are they plausible?
These two questions are linked. How we resolve the challenges of measurement will have a profound impact on the
targets’ power to motivate as well as on the likelihood that those targets will be met. Poverty lines at the national
and local level are frequently revised upward, and there are good reasons for this. This approach, however, risks the
possibility that steady development progress will not yield poverty reduction, simply because the poverty line keeps
moving too. As OWG suggested, extreme poverty is “currently measured as people living on less than US $1.25 a
day”, although that is unlikely to be the case for long. One thing is clear: if we are to “eradicate extreme poverty for
all people everywhere” by 2030, we will have to use an entirely different approach to setting the planetary extreme
poverty line than that used by the World Bank in the past. If we’re going to set a zero goal for global poverty in the
post-2015 development agenda, it has to be an absolute goal, and not one set relative to national poverty lines, and
the process of setting the new global poverty line should be open, transparent and participatory.
Aparajeyo-Bangladesh’s Interventions:
Conditional Cash/Kind Transfers (CCKTs): Our CCKTs are targeted to poor households, conditional on
household investments in education (keep children in school). In this way, they combine a protection goal to
reduce current poverty and a promotion one to reduce future poverty by facilitating investments in human
capital accumulation. Our CCKTs have been influential in redistributing income to the poor. They have had
well-documented impacts on reducing current poverty, increasing school participation, early childhood
development, reducing child labor, reducing early marriage of girls, reduced violence against children & gender-
based violence etc.
Unconditional cash/kind transfers (UCKTs): UCKTs are increasingly used in low-income settings where
conditionalities can be harder to put in place. Small, frequent, and reliable cash payments to poor households
have shown to cause concurrent improvements in multiple domains, such as per capita consumption, savings,
nutrition, mental health, teen pregnancies, child marriages, and intimate partner violence. UCKTs are also a key
tool for social protection responses to shocks such as climatic shocks or the COVID-19 pandemic. With robust
and adaptive social protection systems in place, UCKTs can be rapidly scaled to broaden coverage and/or
increase the transfer size to existing beneficiaries.
However, our working experience shows that the two can be combined. Modest UCKTs can serve as a safety net
for everyone, while being complemented with carefully considered CCKTs to achieve desired investments in
human capital. This way, households, who, for one reason or another, do not comply with CCKT
conditionalities, can still benefit from a social safety net.
Source: Annual Report 2022