Poverty alleviation programs for the extreme poor improve participants’ economic
status and may also impact other important outcomes that are seldom evaluated.
Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction/Targeting the Ultra Poor
(CFPR/TUP), a program implemented by Building Resources Across Communities
(BRAC), has been successful in significantly alleviating extreme poverty in rural
Bangladesh. We hypothesized that the program also improved participants’ subjective
wellbeing and nutritional status (i.e., weight-for-height) of children, and decreased
food insecurity, domestic violence, and distress. A non-equivalent pre- and post-test
quasi-experimental design was used to test the hypotheses. Data were collected from a
random sample of 1618 (640 program and 978 control) households across 261 villages
under 38 BRAC Area Offices of 3 northern districts of Bangladesh in 2002 and 2005-
2006. Linear mixed random-intercept models were used to control for the clustering
effects and other potential confounders.