In Bangladesh, 50 million people live in poverty and around 28 million live in extreme poverty. To date, development agencies have focussed almost exclusively on the needs of the poor and ignored those of the extreme poor.

Building on years of poverty research in Bangladesh, Dr Joe Devine and researchers at the University of Bath have played a key role designing and developing a £65 million programme, which is the country’s first national scale initiative focusing exclusively on extreme poverty.

Impacts from the programme include:

• improving the livelihoods of one million extreme poor people
• helping NGOs design innovative programmes for the extreme poor
• embedding the discourse around extreme poverty in the polity

Impact case study

This research was submitted to the Research Excellence Framework 2014.