This paper studies the long-run effects of a "big-push" program providing a large asset transfer to the poorest Indian households. In… Read more a randomized controlled trial that follows these households over 10 years, we find positive effects on consumption (0.6 SD), food security (0.1 SD), income (0.3 SD), and health (0.2 SD). These effects grow for the first seven years following the transfer and persist until year 10. One main channel for persistence is that treated households take better advantage of opportunities to diversify into more lucrative wage employment, especially through migration. Read less ...

Before COVID-19, many countries were making significant gains in human capital, improving health and education outcomes for girls and boys… Read more and empowering women to reach their potential. Between 2010 and March 2020, the World Bank’s Human Capital Index 2020 Update found an average increase of five percent in the human capital index across countries. Now, the pandemic and its shocks to market, health, and education systems jeopardize this progress – 25 years of development achievements have begun to unwind in the span of 25 weeks. Economic disruptions have disproportionately harmed those who are already vulnerable, threatening to push an additional 47 million women and girls into extreme poverty. Women are more likely to work in the informal economy, preventing many from accessing crucial social protection programs, especially in low-income countries. Women also bear a greater burden of unpaid care work at home, and this gap has only widened during COVID-19. As COVID-19 threatens hard-won gains in human capital around the world, governments, international development organizations, civil society, and the private sector must come together with a revitalized sense of solidarity to deliver emergency support quickly and effectively. Even more important is to take a long-term view of how to support countries in building inclusive, resilient systems for food and nutrition, health, education, social protection, water, sanitation, infrastructure, and jobs. Read less ...

This scoping paper documents current practices used by Graduation Program practitioners to produce meaningful and sustainable improvements in women’s wellbeing.… Read more To do so, it builds on the theory of change in Rao and Kelleher (2005) and adapted by Hillenbrand (2015) and identify practices that affect change along two dimensions: from individual to community levels and from the formal to the informal. We document a number of ways in which such programs attempt to affect change beyond the more traditional aims of alleviating resource and liquidity constraints. Indeed, organizations are increasingly concerned with improving women non- economic outcomes by incorporating empowerment components in their programming and by engaging men and boys in the household and the community. These efforts are in recognition of the need to challenge traditional gender norms to maximize the potential and sustainability of anti-poverty initiatives. Read less ...

The 2018 Global Compact on Refugees includes “enhancing refugee self-reliance” as one of its four main objectives. While the humanitarian community… Read more generally supports this aspiration, it is widely recognized that there are few tools to measure progress toward this objective. In 2016, RefugePoint and the Women’s Refugee Commission convened a Community of Practice (CoP), now known as the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative (RSRI), to address this gap, leading to the joint development of the Self-Reliance Index (SRI). Over the course of two and half years, from March 2017 to August 2019, practitioners from non-governmental organizations, government agencies, foundations, and research institutes worked together to create a simple and universal tool to measure a refugee household’s progress toward selfreliance over time. The SRI Version 1.0 was made available for limited distribution from August 2019 – February 2020 during a ‘soft launch’ phase. This phase produced extensive learning that informed improvements in the SRI for Version 2.0. Following assessments of interrater and intrahousehold reliability during the development stage, data collected in the soft launch phase allowed for assessment of internal consistency. Analysis of the data collected was also used to inform the final scoring system of the SRI. User experience and structured feedback from the in-person training and remote support provided additional input for the refinement of the tool, User Guide and training materials. The iterative development of the SRI is a first global effort to create a universal tool to measure refugee self-reliance, highlighting the importance of continuous learning to understand the SRI in new settings and with new populations. As the SRI 2.0 is rolled out more widely with new partners and in new contexts, there will be a continued effort to monitor the reliability and validity of the tool. In addition, data from new contexts may inform decisions to further refine the tool’s scoring algorithm, although no significant changes to the scoring system are anticipated. Objectives for the next phase will also be aimed at integrating the SRI into a variety of partner systems and investigating the effectiveness of different training mechanisms. The next phase also aims to explore how gender interacts with the use and results of the SRI. Read less ...

This document explores the barriers and opportunities to women's economic empowerment in El Salvador. It provides and in-depth analysis of… Read more women's participation in the civic and economic life, including key regulatory aspects, such women's legal autonomy in banking and finance services, access to justice and social security, among others. Finally, it provides recommendations for tailoring services to women entrepreneurs.  Read less ...

This document explores the barriers and opportunities to women's economic empowerment in Honduras. It provides and in-depth analysis of women's… Read more participation in the civic and economic life, including key regulatory aspects, such women's legal autonomy in banking and finance services, access to justice and social security, among others. Finally, it provides recommendations for tailoring services to women entrepreneurs.  Read less ...

This research aims to contribute to the general knowledge base and to provide practical insights regarding implementation of graduation programmes,… Read more seeking to offer input into the development of a feasible, affordable and effective model for coaching and support within such programmes. It does so on the basis of on an in-depth study of implementation of coaching and support services within Concern Worldwide’s Terintambwe Graduation Model programme in Burundi. Read less ...

This case study was developed as part of Stopping As Success (SAS), a collaborative learning project that aims to study… Read more the dynamics at play when ending a development program, and provide guidelines on how to ensure locally led development. This report describes the graduation approach employed by Trickle Up to create independent village savings and loan associations (VSLAs). The case study highlights how Trickle Up has adapted aspects of the VSLA model to the Guatemalan context in order to establish and then “graduate” individual savings groups. Savings groups are common in Guatemala, with other INGOs interviewed over the course of the case study research also describing their experiences establishing and supporting such groups. However, the savings groups established by Trickle Up have unique characteristics, which have contributed to the groups growing and scaling up over time.  Read less ...

Social Protection for Employment - Community​ (SPEC) is pleased to share this resource matrix to facilitate easy access to publications… Read more on social protection and employment. It has now 200 entries, with the details, including file name, author(s)/ presenter(s), category, focus of the materials, description, publication year, and links of the publications provided. We hope this matrix will be helpful not only for the SPEC members but also for everyone interested in the topics of social protection and employment worldwide. Read less ...

Productive asset grants have become an important tool in efforts to push the very poor out of poverty, but they… Read more require labor to convert the asset into income. Using a clustered randomized trial, we work with the Government of the Philippines to evaluate a key component of their child labor elimination program, a $518 productive asset grant directed at families with child laborers. Treatment increases household based economic activity. Household well-being improves, mainly through increases in food security and child welfare. Households achieve these improvements in well-being by drawing upon the labor of household members. Adolescent labor is the most available labor, and we observe increases in employment among adolescents not engaged in child labor at baseline. Households with a family firm or business prior to treatment especially lack available adult labor to work with the asset leading to increases in child labor, including hazardous work, amongst children who were not in child labor at baseline. Read less ...