This review analyses and summarizes impact evaluation findings that focus on the interaction between agricultural interventions (including rural extension services,… Read more rural development, natural resource management, access to markets, subsidized credit, investment grants, access to improved seeds and fertilizer subsidies), and social protection interventions, with specific attention to social assistance such as cash transfers and public works. The review focuses on outcomes related to hunger, malnu trition and poverty and on the factors contributing to the achievement of these outcomes, particularly those factors related to labour market participation and productive activities. Read less ...

Authors study how women’s choices over labor activities in village economies correlate with poverty and whether enabling the poorest women… Read more to take on the activities of their richer counterparts can set them on a sustainable trajectory out of poverty Read less ...

The Government of Malawi is currently reviewing the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP), which was initiated in 2005/2006, as a… Read more programme to combat poverty and food insecurity. This paper is intended to inform the FISP review and, in particular, how it can be coordinated with the Social Cash Transfer Programme (SCTP), in order to enable the FISP to more effectively fulfill its objectives of reducing poverty and food insecurity. Read less ...

This study examines the impact of Ethiopia's large-scale social protection programme Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) on local and national… Read more economy-wide productivity. PSNP combines public works employment for cash or cereals and direct transfers and is targeted at the poor and vulnerable. It is anticipated,however, that the programme will likely have impacts on non-beneficiaries too. To estimate these impacts, the study uses local economy-wide impact evaluation (LEWIE) model to simulate PSNP and evaluate impacts. It also uses computerised general equilibrium (CGE) modelling to estimate nationwide spillovers. Results suggest substantial local economy-wide impacts of PSNP. The programme's multiplier effect vary considerably across kebeles, and they include both positive and negative spillovers for non-recipient households. Nationwide impacts are sizeable. While PSNP areas see the largest income benefits (with 6% increase in household income), the rest of the country also experiences income benefits of up to 2 - 4%, as a result of the PSNP's impacts on supply and demand, wages and prices. Read less ...

The impact of micro-credit interventions on existing credit markets is theoretically ambiguous. Previous empirical work suggests the entry of a… Read more joint-liability lender may lead to a positive impact on the informal lending rate. This paper presents the first randomized controlled trial–based evidence on this question. Households in rural Bihar, India, were offered low-cost credit through a government-led self-help group program, the rollout of which was randomized at the panchayat level. The intervention led to a dramatic 14.5 percent decline in the use of informal credit, as households substituted to lower-cost self-help group loans. Due to the program, the average rate paid on recent loans fell from 69 to 58 percent per year overall. Rates on informal loans also declined slightly. Among landless households, informal lending rates fell from 65.5 to 63.2 percent, decreasing by 40 percent the gap in rates paid by landless versus landowning households. Two years after the initiation of the program, significant positive impacts on asset ownership among landless households were apparent. Impacts on various indicators of women's empowerment were mixed, and showed no clear direction when aggregated, nor was there any impact on consumption expenditures Read less ...

Cash transfers and index insurance have become popular interventions by development agencies worldwide, yet surprisingly little is known about these… Read more programs' comparative impacts on participant behavior or well-being. This paper exploits exogenous variation in program participation and panel data from Kenya to compare the causal impacts of a cash transfer program (HSNP) and an index-based insurance product (IBLI), which were implemented contemporaneously among the same population. We find that both programs benefit clients. HSNP improves child health, as measured by mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC), and helps households maintain their mobility-dependent livestock production strategies. Households with IBLI coverage make productivity increasing investments, reduce distress sales of livestock during droughts, and see a marked increase in income per adult equivalent. Estimating the impacts per total program costs reveals that the two programs perform comparably on average, while IBLI's impacts per unit marginal cost are considerably larger than HSNP's. Read less ...

Jobs are the number one policy concern of policy makers in many countries. The global financial crisis, rising demographic pressures,… Read more high unemployment rates, and concerns over automation all make it seem imperative that policy makers employ increasingly more active labor market policies. This paper critically examines recent evaluations of labor market policies that have provided vocational training, wage subsidies, job search assistance, and assistance moving to argue that many active labor market policies are much less effective than policymakers typically assume. Many of these evaluations find no significant impacts on either employment or earnings. One reason is that urban labor markets appear to work reasonably well in many cases, with fewer market failures than is often thought. As a result, there is less of a role for many traditional active labor market policies than is common practice. The review then discusses examples of job creation policies that do seem to offer promise, and concludes with lessons for impact evaluation and policy is this area. Read less ...

This paper investigates the interplay between the Social Cash Transfer Programme (SCTP) and the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) in… Read more Malawi. We take advantage of data collected from a seventeen-month evaluation of a sample of households eligible to receive SCTP, which also provided information about inclusion into FISP. We estimate two types of synergies: i) the complementarity between SCTP and FISP, i.e. whether the impact of both interventions run together is larger than the sum of the impacts of these interventions when run separately, and ii) the incremental impact of receiving FISP when a household already receives SCTP, as well as the incremental impact of receiving SCTP when a household already receives FISP. The analysis shows that there are synergies between the two policy interventions, mainly in terms of incremental impact of each programme over the other, in increasing expenditure, agricultural production and livestock Read less ...

Safety nets in Africa are a popular policy instrument to address the widespread chronic poverty and encourage human capital investments… Read more in the education and health of children. Although there have been considerable analyses on the impacts of safety nets globally, particularly in Latin America, less been done on synthesizing results across Sub-Saharan African programs. This study fills this gap by systematically extracting and standardizing the results across impact evaluations for better understanding of what has been achieved using this policy instrument in the continent. The study finds that these programs on average have significant positive impacts on total and food consumption. The programs show promising results on asset accumulation, such as livestock ownership. However, there is substantial heterogeneity in the impacts achieved across programs for some development outcomes. Through exploring this heterogeneity in impacts, the study puts forward several suggestions for better targeting various development outcomes through modifications in the design and implementation of safety net programs. Read less ...

Can extensions such as coaching and training augment the poverty relief effects of cash transfers, or do they unnecessarily constrain… Read more the agency of recipients in the allocation of program resources? We use a randomized trial to estimate the impacts of philosophically distinct variants of transfer-based poverty reduction approaches in rural Uganda. One is a microenterprise intervention in the spirit of so-called graduation programming that provides beneficiaries with an integrated package of cash transfers, coaching, and training on sustainable livelihoods; the other variant monetizes the cost of coaching and training so as to more than double the size of cash transfers. We also we evaluate the merits of more marginal individual extension components, involving savings group formation in the microenterprise variant and light-touch behavioral intervention (involving goal-setting and plan-making) in the cash variant. Overall, we build confidence that investing program resources in productive extensions can expand poverty reduction. We gain elevated confidence in the impacts and cost-effectiveness of the fully integrated microenterprise intervention. Read less ...