UPPR — Bangladesh's Community-Led Urban Poverty Reduction Programme

The Urban Partnerships for Poverty Reduction (UPPR) programme ran in Bangladesh from March 2008 to August 2015, building on an earlier pilot (the Local Partnerships for Urban Poverty Alleviation Project, 2000–2007). It was, at the time, the largest urban poverty-reduction programme in Bangladesh, jointly funded by UK aid, UNDP and the Government of Bangladesh, with beneficiary communities also contributing.

UPPR organised residents of low-income urban settlements into community groups that produced their own "community action plans," which in turn generated prioritised contracts for infrastructure improvements and livelihood activities. Communities executed these contracts directly and managed the associated funds themselves.

The programme reported reaching roughly 3 million poor and extreme-poor residents, with a particular focus on women and girls, across 23 towns and cities.

A 2016 UNDP-commissioned study documenting the programme's practices drew on interviews with 21 institutional stakeholders and 100 community participants across all 23 towns, and identified 11 practices considered exemplary for urban poverty reduction, feeding into Bangladesh's subsequent National Urban Poverty Reduction Programme. Public reporting reviewed here documents the programme's scale, funding structure and process design well, but does not provide independently verified quantitative outcome metrics (e.g. income or health changes) at the household level, limiting the strength of the impact evidence available.