It is widely understood that poverty undermines early childhood development (ECD). In turn, poor ECD reinforces the intergenerational transmission of… Read more poverty. Economic strengthening through comprehensive social protection may offer a ‘double boon’: it can improve child wellbeing in the shortterm and reduce poverty in the long-run. This report presents findings from a mixed-methods study that investigated how so-called graduation programmes can affect outcomes for young children, particularly seeking insights into pathways, dynamics and contextual factors that underpin positive or negative linkages. It does so in a context of widespread poverty, low levels of child wellbeing and limited availability of services in rural Haiti. Read less ...

This paper sets out to synthesize key lessons from studies using alternative methodologies to impact assessment. Drawing on Sen’s capability… Read more approach as a conceptual framework, it analyses two pairs of impact assessments which were carried out in West Bengal and Sindh around the same time and within close proximity to each other. Each pair consisted of a randomized control trial and a qualitative assessment of attempts to pilot BRAC’s approach to transferring assets to women in extreme poverty. The paper reports on the findings of these studies, their strategies for establishing their claims about causality and the information base they drew on to establish these claims. It finds that not only did the RCTs fail to meet their own criteria for establishing causality, but they also provided very limited explanation for the patterns of outcomes observed. Such information formed the substance of the qualitative studies. The paper concludes that greater use of mixed methods could help to offset some of limitations of RCTs and to place their findings on much firmer ground. Read less ...

This report documents cross-country findings from analysis conducted by World Bank staff working on Jobs Diagnostics. It identifies some key… Read more insights for policy makers to take into account when designing policies and programs for inclusive growth. The findings are drawn from three different sources. The macroeconomic section analyzes data for over 16,000 overlapping episodes of economic growth in 125 countries. The labor supply section analyzes labor data from the latest household surveys in 150 countries around the world. The firm-level analysis draws on business data from countries for which—at the time of writing—the World Bank had conducted a Jobs Diagnostic. The report identifies jobs-related transitions as the pathways people follow to better jobs —workers increase their hours worked, become more productive in their work, move between locations, change sectors and occupations, and shift from self- to waged employment and from less to more successful firms. Read less ...

The World Development Report (WDR) 2019: The Changing Nature of Work studies how the nature of work is changing as… Read more a result of advances in technology today. Fears that robots will take away jobs from people have dominated the discussion over the future of work, but the World Development Report 2019 finds that on balance this appears to be unfounded. Work is constantly reshaped by technological progress. Firms adopt new ways of production, markets expand, and societies evolve. Overall, technology brings opportunity, paving the way to create new jobs, increase productivity, and deliver effective public services. Firms can grow rapidly thanks to digital transformation, expanding their boundaries and reshaping traditional production patterns. The rise of the digital platform firm means that technological effects reach more people faster than ever before. Technology is changing the skills that employers seek. Workers need to be better at complex problem-solving, teamwork and adaptability. Digital technology is also changing how people work and the terms on which they work. Even in advanced economies, short-term work, often found through online platforms, is posing similar challenges to those faced by the world’s informal workers. The Report analyzes these changes and considers how governments can best respond. Investing in human capital must be a priority for governments in order for workers to build the skills in demand in the labor market. In addition, governments need to enhance social protection and extend it to all people in society, irrespective of the terms on which they work. To fund these investments in human capital and social protection, the Report offers some suggestions as to how governments can mobilize additional revenues by increasing the tax base. Read less ...

The Pastoralist Areas Resilience Improvement and Market Expansion (PRIME) project, funded under the United States Government’s Feed the Future initiative,… Read more was launched in October 2012 in one of the most shock-prone areas of the world, the drylands of Ethiopia. A key objective of the project is to enhance the resilience of households to shocks. In particular, it aims to enable households to withstand and recover from the recurrent climate-related shocks—mainly drought—to which they are subjected. The analysis presented in this report is being undertaken as part of an impact evaluation (IE) whose goal is to determine whether the PRIME project has a positive impact on households’ resilience to shocks and, thus, on wellbeing outcomes including poverty, food security, and children’s nutritional status. Read less ...

Fonkoze’s ‘Graduation’ programme, Chemin Lavi Miyo (CLM), targets extremely poor households in rural Haiti and provides a comprehensive package of inputs… Read more designed to support their ascent out of poverty. CLM does this through a multi-pronged livelihoods protection and promotion scheme that combines livelihoods support, social protection, financial inclusion, and the guidance of regular case-manager visits over 18 months. While the CLM programme has demonstrated high rates of graduation and positive outcomes reported soon after graduation, there remains a key question of whether gains are sustained. The purpose of this mixed methods study is to understand the longer-term drivers of progress and decline for CLM participants who entered the program in 2011 to 2013. The study aims to deepen Fonkoze’s understanding of how to support participants to sustain a path out of poverty. The research explores whether participants continue to sustain and improve their situation after graduation, or in the face of on-going challenges and shocks, gradually slip back into poverty, and what the practical measures are that CLM can take to support these. Read less ...

Can training and mentorship expand the economic impact of cash transfer programs, or would such extensions waste resources that recipients… Read more could allocate more impactfully by themselves? Over the course of two years, a Ugandan nonprofit organization implemented alternative poverty alleviation approaches in a randomized manner. These included an integrated graduation-style program involving cash transfers as well as extensive training and mentorship; a slightly simplified variant excluding training on savings group formation; and a radically simplified approach that monetized all intangibles and delivered cash only. Light-touch behavioral extensions involving goal-setting and plan-making were also implemented with some cash transfer recipients. We find that simplifying the integrated program tended to erode its impact. Read less ...

To reduce extreme poverty and break its intergenerational transmission, the Government of Tanzania created the productive social safety net (PSSN).… Read more The specific objective of the PSSN, which is implemented by the Tanzania social action fund (TASAF), is to increase income and consumption and improve the ability to cope with shocks among vulnerable populations, while enhancing and protecting the human capital of their children. This impact evaluation (IE) aims to contribute to the body of evidence on the effectiveness of conditional cash transfers (CCTs), particularly in the sub-Saharan Africa context. The IE design examines the impacts of a large-scale government program using an experimental design. While the baseline report of this IE assessed the PSSN’s targeting performance, the targeting aspects of this report focus on understanding whether recertification is appropriate at this stage. The baseline report provided evidence on how successful the three-stage targeting system - combining geographical, community-based, and a proxy means test - was at identifying the poorest households in Tanzania. This report also aims to identify key implementation factors driving the PSSN’s success and areas where the program can evolve further. The report is divided into following sections: section two gives introduction. Section three describes the context in which the evaluation is conducted. Section four presents the evaluation’s objectives, study design, and methodological issues related to the design. Section five presents in-depth the PSSN impacts on household beneficiaries using the midline data. Section six examines key program implementation aspects, such as the current performance of the targeting and payment systems and transfer adequacy, to identify whether the appropriate amounts are being delivered to the intended beneficiaries on time. Section seven concludes. Read less ...

We study two interventions for underemployed youth across five Ethiopian sites: a $300 grant to spur self-employment, and a job… Read more offer to an industrial firm. Despite significant impacts on occupational choice, income, and health in the first year, after five years we see nearly complete convergence across all groups and outcomes. Shortrun increases in productivity and earnings from the grant dissipate as recipients exit their micro-enterprises. Adverse effects of factory work on health found after one year also appear to be temporary. These results suggest that one-time and one-dimensional interventions may struggle to overcome barriers to wage- or selfemployment. Read less ...

Research on the impact of financial services on the lives of low-income people provides valuable insights. However, these studies tend… Read more to focus on microcredit or a single financial product, such as savings or mobile money. As a result, an overly simplistic and product-focused story has emerged. Recognizing the need for a more nuanced and clearer impact narrative, this Focus Note synthesizes evidence since 2014 and highlights three overarching insights: 1) Financial services improve resilience both by facilitating recovery from shocks and encouraging investments that are riskier but potentially more profitable in the longer term. 2) Women’s control and ownership of financial services can improve their bargaining power in the household and enable positive outcomes, such as increasing their participation in the labor force. 3) Emerging evidence suggests that financial inclusion can contribute to increased economic growth and reduced poverty. Other findings demonstrate that expanding access to basic accounts alone is unlikely to result in detectable welfare benefits, while digitizing financial services shows promising effects on poverty but also introduces potential risks (e.g., weakening of social networks). Going forward, more information is needed on context and customer demographics to better understand who benefits from certain financial services and how and under what circumstances financial inclusion may not be beneficial. Read less ...