BRAC was founded in Bangladesh in 1972 and now works in nine other countries with very impoverished populations: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Philippines, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Liberia. From its years of experience designing and implementing microfinance and other programs, BRAC gained the insight that a unique set of interventions is required to bring out of extreme poverty those who they, and now others, call the "ultra-poor": people living on half or less of a US $1.25-a-day poverty threshold. BRAC pioneered the approach in 2002 by combining social safety nets with support for income-generating, and named it the Graduation approach, or Targeting the Ultra Poor (TUP) program. Graduation programs complement small cash stipends and in-kind asset transfers with several other sequenced interventions including savings, training, social integration and health care services. Over the last decade the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), the Ford Foundation, and other donors have supported ten pilots across different continents which have been carefully analyzed, and in which over 75% of participants have met Graduation requirements. This paper summarizes the landscape and institutional context within which the Targeting the Ultra-poor program sits, in order to help BRAC and other organizations to expand its scale and encourage others to support and adopt this approach, thereby helping an additional one million families graduate from ultra-poverty by 2020
