Press Release
July 5, 2019 • 2 min read
Irish humanitarian aid agency, GOAL, has joined a powerful new global coalition aimed at alleviating poverty for thousands of vulnerable refugees and host community populations around the world.
GOAL is one of eleven large international NGOs who are part of the Poverty Alleviation Coalition, convened by UNHCR and the World Bank’s “Partnership for Economic Inclusion” (“PEI”).
The coalition is aimed at helping agencies upscale their response to alleviate the most extreme poverty for half a million of the most vulnerable refugee and host-community populations across thirty-five countries by 2025. It is comprised of NGOs at the vanguard of practice in poverty alleviation, local economic development, and humanitarian intervention.
Combining the strengths of humanitarian and development assistance is at the heart of the initiative. Participant organisations include World Vision, Mercy Corps, Concern Worldwide, Village Enterprise and the Norwegian Refugee Council among others. Most of the Coalition organisations have ongoing development programmes in the countries of most concern.
The Coalition will adopt the well-proven poverty alleviation model – the Graduation Approach – which targets extremely poor households. The duration of a graduation programme is approximately 18-36 months per household.
The approach includes a combination of consumption support, development of market-oriented skills for self and waged employment, cash/asset transfer and access to savings, financial inclusion, social and legal services, as well as mentoring. The model shows strong results with 95% of participants graduating out of poverty in a review of the approach, which has been availed of in forty-three countries.
It was determined that the budget per household target for poverty alleviation will be approximately 1,400 USD, or US$ 700 million in total, to alleviate poverty for half a million households by 2025. The Coalition will avail of the ‘Parallel Funding’ model, in which each Coalition member will be responsible for own fund management. Joint or multiple funding initiatives will be undertaken where appropriate and possible.
To ensure consistency and coordination, as well as to assess the impact of the initiative, implementing Coalition members will report directly to the UNHCR and PEI.
