To condition or not to condition; that is a question that preoccupies social protection experts and policy-makers alike, and one that divides rights-based camps from the incentives-based ones. This commentary argues that this debate may be a red herring. The line between conditional and...

This article investigates the impact of extending piped water supply and sanitation on health outcomes in urban Yemen using a combination of quasi-experimental methods and results from microbiological water tests. Variations in project roll-out allow separate identification of water and...

This paper evaluates the impact of food aid (food-for-work and free food distribution) on rural poverty in Ethiopia. Using household panel survey data, we estimate causal impacts using difference-in-difference matching methods and endogenous switching regression. We find that while participation...

Systematic review methodology pioneered in health care has been increasingly applied to development questions of importance in lower- and middle-income countries. This paper reports one such review on the topic of microfinance in sub-Saharan Africa and reflects on the number of pragmatic...

The conditional cash transfer revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean, beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing to this day, heralded a new prominence and acceptance of applying rigorous impact evaluations to social programmes. Over the last decade, sub-Saharan Africa has begun its own...

High-quality impact evaluations, including randomised experiments, are increasingly popular, but cannot always inform resource allocation decisions unless the costs of interventions are considered alongside their effects. Cost-effectiveness analysis is a straightforward but under-utilised tool...

Income growth in rural areas is a considerable challenge to further poverty reduction and economic development. Using a survey of rural Bhutanese households, we investigate the impacts of a vocational skills training programme that was intended to diversify incomes outside agriculture. We find...

Theory-based systematic reviews, which summarise evidence on what works, when and why, strive for greater policy relevance. Reviews that answer these questions adopt a mixed methods approach and draw on a range of study types. Answering the ‘what works’ and ‘what doesn't’ questions means...

We provide a ‘how to’ guide to undertake systematic reviews of effects in international development, by which we mean, synthesis of literature relating to the effectiveness of particular development interventions. Our remit includes determining the review's questions and scope, literature...

The past decade has seen renewed interest in the use of mixed-method approaches across the social sciences and in the field of impact assessment. This body of work has focused on questions of method with insufficient attention devoted to foundational issues. The objective of the present article...