Program Evaluation

Anti-poverty programs implemented in recent years in developing countries typically have multiple goals beyond improving income levels. Assessing the effectiveness of these interventions has gained increased currency in light of the UN‘s Millennium Development Goals. We introduce multidimensional poverty measures to the program evaluation literature in order to provide a comprehensive measure of program effectiveness in the presence of multiple outcomes. We combine robust multidimensional poverty measures with difference-in-difference matching estimators to evaluate the effectiveness of the Targeting the Ultra-Poor (TUP) program undertaken in Bangladesh that aimed to improve the well being of families living in extreme poverty across a number of dimensions. We show that the TUP program reduced multidimensional poverty among the treated group by 18-21 percentage points relative to the comparison group, or nearly 25 percent relative to the baseline poverty rate. 1 We would like to thank Susan Davis of BRAC USA and Munshi Sulaiman of BRAC for providing us with the dataset to do this research work.