The graduation pathway
Health and food first. Then school. Then savings and a trade.
Ramah is piloting its execution of a model already tested in randomised trials.
Most graduation programmes draw a straight line. Ramah's forks, because a household is not one person.
Three stages, five programmes. The Earn stage carries three, which is why the counts differ. Basic needs support and intensive coaching run alongside all five.
Health is the foundation everything else stands on. No vocational training or savings group works if participants are sick or hungry. In Nabdam, health insurance coverage contributes 14.1% of the district's multidimensional poverty, and the lean season from March to July leaves households with no buffer against illness or a bad harvest.
What it involves
What will be measured
Free SHS covers tuition, so fees are no longer the barrier. Distance, supplies, menstrual hygiene and hunger are. School lag contributes 8.5% of the district's poverty, and Nabdam has one public senior high school. Ramah plans to support every vulnerable child in an enrolled household, orphan or not. Funding is pooled across the community, and no child is individually sponsored.
What it involves
What will be measured
Savings groups are the financial floor that turns a trained woman into a business owner. Widows will pool weekly savings, take low-interest loans from their own group's fund, and build the capital base a trade needs. The first group of about 20 widows forms in February 2027, built on what the December pilot teaches.
What it involves
What will be measured
Nabdam has no technical or vocational institution at all. Ramah starts with two trades that form one value chain: shea processing and soap making. Training without a market does not create a business, so training begins only once buyers, start-up capital and input supply are confirmed. The goal is a functioning business.
What it involves
What will be measured
A productive asset transfer, the component the graduation evidence relies on most. The design is four goats at intake, then a shea and soap production kit on completing training, released only once buyers are confirmed. The kit is transferred to the household outright. Costs are planning figures until household consumption and market prices are measured at the December 2026 pilot.
What it involves
What will be measured
The two trades were picked together because one produces what the other needs.
The district's oldest skill
Women in Nabdam have processed shea for generations. Ramah's design trains cooperatives in semi-mechanised methods, using equipment manufactured locally in Bolgatanga. Any route to market waits until buyers are confirmed and Ramah has decided how sale would be licensed.
Training and own-household use first
The primary input for soap is shea butter, which is why the two trades were chosen together. Soap is a regulated cosmetic in Ghana. Training and soap made for trainees' own households come first; any sale would follow only after FDA premises licensing and product registration, and Ramah has not yet decided whether to take that route.
The evidence base
The 2015 Science trial tested the full bundle against a control across six countries and 10,495 households. It did not test the bundle against its own components.
The 2022 Journal of Development Economics paper did, using two extra experimental arms at the Ghana site. Savings alone weakened by year three. Four goats alone showed no positive welfare effect at all: households sold or ate them. Only the full bundle produced income effects that lasted.
That is why Ramah does not offer the stages as a menu, and does not drop one to save money.
Benefit-cost ratio, by country arm
India
433% benefit-cost · 23.4% IRR
Strongest of the six
Ghana
133% benefit-cost · 6.9% IRR
Weakest of the five where benefits exceeded costs
Ramah plans to work where the number is weakest, and where the evidence is deepest. Ghana is the arm researchers returned to in 2022 to test the bundle against its own parts. That is why it is the number Ramah plans against: a modest result from a site taken apart and examined says more about what to do than a strong one from a site nobody unpacked.
Banerjee, Duflo, Goldberg, Karlan, Osei, Parienté, Shapiro, Thuysbaert and Udry (2015), “A multifaceted program causes lasting progress for the very poor”, Science 348(6236). Ghana arm implemented by Presbyterian Agricultural Services with Innovations for Poverty Action, in Northern and Upper East communities adjacent to Nabdam.
Nabdam's place among Ghana's poorest districts is the result of decades of development spending that favoured the south. Ramah plans to deliver programmes and to argue about the arithmetic that produced this.
Using ground-level data to argue for equitable allocation to northern districts. A district of 51,861 people with no technical or vocational school is a policy outcome.
Building working relationships with Ghana Health Service, the District Assembly and other organisations already active in Nabdam, so that Ramah adds to their work and avoids duplicating it.
Publishing outcome data openly, including what does not work, so that communities, funders and government can hold Ramah to account and useful parts can be copied.
The first three days come in December.
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