"In the 1990s it became clear that microfinance, then the most exciting tool in development economics, was not reaching the very poorest people... BRAC came up

"In the 1990s it became clear that microfinance, then the most exciting tool in development economics, was not reaching the very poorest people... BRAC came up with a scheme to help the ultra-poor. It gives them a small stipend for food, followed by an asset such as a cow or a few goats, which they are expected to manage. Field workers visit weekly for the next two years, teaching recipients, for example, how to tell when a cow is in heat and how to get it inseminated. The aim is to help women 'graduate' from extreme poverty to the normal kind—as Sir Fazle puts it, 'to help them back into the mainstream of poor people'. ...A study published earlier this year in Science showed that similar programmes run by other NGOs boosted consumption in Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Pakistan and Peru, with the effects lasting at least a year after they ended. ...Such programmes are pricey. In India and Bangladesh they cost more than $1,000 per household at purchasing power parity. Other research explains why. ...The poorest women, it turned out, did far more hours of income-generating work...Yet they packed them into fewer days... The reason is that they toil mostly as domestic servants and in the fields—and casual agricultural work is seasonal. During planting and harvest they work extremely hard; the rest of the year they do little. Better-off women usually rear livestock, which is not only steady work but pays about twice as much per hour. When the poorest women are given cows, they quickly fill their idle time..."