A recent review of evidence on the impacts of business training indicates the need to develop alternatives to formal classroom training, simpler rules-of-thumb-type trainings for less sophisticated firms, and business trainings that can be scaled up affordably. In partnership with ideas42, the...

Many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa face a rapidly growing population and labor force in demand of good jobs. Ethiopia has reacted to this challenge by prioritizing large-scale industrial development through the construction of industrial parks to drive exports, job creation, and growth....

The Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) was initiated in 2008 in Pakistan to aid the poor and vulnerable, particularly in response to the global financial crisis. The National Socio-Economic Registry (NSER), established by BISP, is a key component for determining eligibility for Kafaalat...

The Millennium Development Goal of halving the incidence of extreme poverty from its 1990 level will be achieved in 2015, and the international development community is now moving to a new goal of “ending extreme poverty.” However, the data needed to monitor progress remain severely limited....

Poor households are heterogeneous in the circumstances preventing an improvement in their welfare. It is important to understand the nuances within different types of poor households so that critical pathways out of poverty that remedy the variegated sets of constraints they face can be...

Improving the livelihoods of poor households and transitioning them to the labor force is a major challenge in Ethiopia. Productive safety nets that include livelihood grants and other support services could be a promising intervention toward this end. However, the evidence on the welfare and...

This paper studies the effect of rolling out mobile money agents in rural Northern Uganda. In a randomized experiment, 168 areas were randomly selected to receive an agent in 2017, with another 163 areas serving as a control group. Administrative data on mobile money transactions suggest that...

This paper examines welfare disparities between in-camp refugees and host com- munities in Ethiopia, using data from the 2023 Socio-Economic Survey of Refugees in Ethiopia. The analysis reveals significant welfare gaps between in-camp refugees and hosts even after accounting for various other...

This study analyzes the impacts of the recent rural road development in Ethiopia on welfare and economic outcomes. The identification of the impacts relies on a difference-in-differences matching approach, taking advantage of the nationally representative household survey and the original road...

On current trends, the future of global poverty reduction will be determined by Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet even during Sub-Saharan Africa's period of high economic growth -- roughly corresponding to the first decade and a half of the 2000s -- the extent to which this growth translated into improved...