The graduation pathway
A widow does not receive a one-off training. Her household enters a staged pathway: health and food first, then children in school, then savings and a trade chosen for demand that already exists.
Ramah is piloting its execution of a proven model. We are not testing whether the model works.
Most graduation programmes draw a straight line. Ramah's forks, because a household is not one person.
Three stages, four programmes. The Earn stage carries two, which is why the counts differ.
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 serves all vulnerable children in enrolled households, not orphans alone, through pooled community funding rather than individual sponsorship.
What it involves
What will be measured
Savings groups are the financial floor that turns a trained woman into a business owner. Widows pool weekly savings, access 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 not a certificate. It is a functioning business.
What it involves
What will be measured
The trades were not picked from a list. They were picked because one produces what the other needs.
The district's oldest skill, connected to a formal market
Women in Nabdam have processed shea for generations. Ramah's design trains cooperatives in semi-mechanised methods, pairs them with equipment manufactured locally in Bolgatanga, and routes them toward certified aggregators through cooperative membership.
The shortest route from training to first income
Soap making turns the first cohort's butter into a saleable product. Ghana's FDA runs a Progressive Licensing Scheme for cottage industries at low annual cost, and first income is expected within weeks of training rather than months. The primary input is shea butter, which is why the two trades were chosen together.
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 works 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 position at the bottom of the table is the result of decades of development spending that favoured the south. Ramah delivers programmes and argues 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, not an accident.
Building working relationships with Ghana Health Service, the District Assembly and other organisations already active in Nabdam, rather than duplicating them.
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.