The Chars Livelihoods Programme (CLP) is a major programme delivering a mix of welfare and development support to extremely poor households… Read more living on low-lying temporary sand islands (called chars) on the Jamuna River in Northern Bangladesh. The first programme, CLP-1, ran from 2004-2010 and was funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). It was succeeded by a second programme, CLP-2, in 2010, with the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) joining as a funding partner.In order to fully identify the achievements of CLP-1 and future lessons for CLP-2 and other donors, DFID Bangladesh (DFID-B) commissioned an independent impact assessment of CLP-1. The impact assessment revealed that that CLP-1 was a good programme that had positive impacts, but this report’s evidence raises questions about whether or not it was as good as the managing agents and DFID-B judged it at the end of the programme. Read less ...

This paper provides a synthesis of current global evidence on the impact of cash transfers in developing countries, and of… Read more what works in different contexts, or for different developing objectives. Read less ...

Fonkoze‘s Chemin Lavi Miyo (CLM) project is designed as an intervention to tackle extreme poverty in Haiti. The face of… Read more extreme poverty is multifaceted, and this reality holds strong in Haiti. Poverty in Haiti is characterised by livelihood insecurity, vulnerability and lack of social safety nets. In response to this complex set of deprivations, Fonkoze initiated a multi-pronged livelihoods protection and promotion scheme designed to provide extremely poor women in rural Haiti an opportunity to begin a slow and steady ascent out of poverty. CLM targets extremely poor women with a comprehensive package of inputs. These cover five main areas: Building sustainable livelihoods through a cash stipend and provision of productive assets. Reducing vulnerability through access to health services and savings. Building skills, confidence and agency through close support of a CLM case-manager who provides enterprise training, advice, moral support. Improving social conditions through the provision of housing renovations; water filters; school uniforms. Strengthening social networks via social links with village elites Read less ...

People's well-being is a function not just their income but of their levels of 5 assets (human, natural, social, … Read more physical and financial), their vulnerability to stresses and shocks, and the impact of policies, institutions and processes. The paper draws on experience from South Africa in particular, but also from other African and international experience, to draw out lessons for improving the lives and livelihoods of poor people, as well as making them protagonists with agency and not just passive "beneficiaries" of development. The paper discussed the implications for scaling-up such programmes. Read less ...

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This study is an outcome of the collaborative research agreement between International Food Policy Research Institute and BRAC. IFPRI’s Food Consumption and… Read more Nutrition Division and BRAC’s Research and Evaluation Division jointly carried out this study to assess the impact of the CFPR programme on livelihoods of the ultra poor in Bangladesh. While several studies have looked into the components of the CFPR programme and its impacts (Rabbani et al. 2006, Haseen and Sulaiman 2007), this study uses rigorous, state-of-the-art techniques to assess the impact of the programme on welfare outcomes of its beneficiaries. Read less ...

Although there has been considerable recent interest in micro-credit programs, rigorous evidence on the impacts of forming self-help groups to… Read more mobilize savings and foster social empowerment at the local level is virtually non-existent, despite a large number of programs following this pattern. The authors use a large household survey to assess the economic and social impacts of the formation of self-help groups in India. They find positive impacts on empowerment and nutritional intake in program areas overall and heterogeneity of impacts between members of pre-existing and newly formed groups, as well as non-participants. Female social and economic empowerment in program areas increased irrespective of participation status, suggesting positive externalities. Nutritional benefit was more pronounced for new participants than for members of pre-existing groups. Evidence of higher consumption - but not income or asset formation - by participants suggests that at the time of the survey, the program's main economic impact had been through consumption smoothing and diversification of income sources rather than exploitation of new income sources. Evaluation of such programs in ways that allow heterogeneity of program impact can yield highly policy-relevant insights. Read less ...

This paper uses household panel data to provide robust evidence on the effects of BRAC’s Targeting the Ultra-poor Program in Bangladesh.… Read more Our identification strategy exploits type-1 errors in assignment, comparing households correctly included with those incorrectly excluded, according to program criteria. Evidence from difference-in-difference matching and sensitivity analysis shows that participation had significant positive effects on income, food consumption and security, household durables, and livestock, but no robust impact on health, ownership of homestead land, housing quality and other productive assets. Using quantile difference-in-difference, we find that the income gains from program participation is smaller for the lowest two deciles. Read less ...

Among active labor market programs, job training is popular in Latin America as an attempt to help the labor market… Read more insertion of disadvantaged youth, and also as a way of providing skills to low-income groups to enable them to deal with the challenges of globalization. This paper summarizes the findings from the first rigorous set of evaluations to job training programs in Latin America that were made in the context of a project undertaken by the Office of Evaluation and Oversight at the Inter-American Development Bank. This research was complemented by two independent impact evaluations of similar training programs in Chile and Colombia. We report the results of two evaluations with an experimental design (the Dominican Republic and Colombia), one with a natural experiment (Panama) and four non-experimental evaluations (Argentina, Chile, Peru and Mexico). Overall, the results suggest that employment effects range from modest to meaningful –increasing the employment rate by about 0 to 5 percentage points—although higher and significant for some groups such, as women in Colombia and Panama –with impact of 6 to 12 percentage points in the employment rate. In most cases there is a larger and significant impact on job quality, measured by getting a formal job, having a contract and/or receiving health insurance as a benefit. Finally, we present an operational definition of the impact of trainingon “employability” in the context of a dynamic model with state dependence and unobserved heterogeneity, which we were able to apply in the evaluations of the Dominican Republic, Panama and Argentina. Read less ...

This paper demonstrates that there are potentially large returns to social protection policy that stakes out a productive safety net… Read more below the vulnerable and keeps them from slipping into a poverty trap. Much of the value of the productive safety net comes from mitigating the ex ante effects of risk and crowding in additional investment. The analysis also explores the implications of different mechanisms of targeting social protection transfers. In the presence of poverty traps, modestly regressive targeting based on critical asset thresholds may have better long-run poverty reduction effects than traditional needs-based targeting. Read less ...