We estimate the impact of Bolsa Família on a range of education outcomes, including school participation, grade progression, grade repetition, and dropout rates. Using a large-sample household panel survey from 2005-2009 collected for this evaluation, we develop a statistically balanced...

We examine the role of gender in adoption and diffusion of orange sweet potato, a biofortified staple food crop being promoted as a strategy to increase dietary intakes of vitamin A among young children and adult women in Uganda. As an agricultural intervention with nutrition objectives,...

Adoption of productivity and income-enhancing agricultural technologies is conspicuously low in Africa south of the Sahara. Farmers' beliefs regarding the authenticity of agricultural inputs are important for explaining technology adoption: if farmers do not believe that inputs are genuine, they...

Over the last decade, social safety nets (SSNs) have rapidly expanded in Africa, becoming a core strategy for addressing poverty, responding to shocks, increasing productivity and investing in human capital. Poverty, vulnerability and well-being have inherent gender dimensions, yet only recently...

While indirect methods are increasingly widely used to measure sensitive behaviors such as intimate partner violence in order to minimize social desirability biases in responses, in developing countries the use of more complex indirect questioning methods raises important questions around how...

Despite wide use of women's decisionmaking indicators, both as a direct measure of intrahousehold decisionmaking and as a proxy for women's empowerment or bargaining power, little has been done to explore what such indicators capture and how effective they measure program impacts on empowerment....

Discussions on food aid and dependency often draw on what appears to be a broad body of evidence, but closer inspection reveals that much of this does not in fact demonstrate a causal link between the two. This desk review has three objectives: (i) to identify the pathways through which negative...

The importance of children’s nutritional status for subsequent human capital formation, the limited evidence of the effectiveness of social protection interventions on child nutrition, and the absence of knowledge on the intra-household impacts of cash and food transfers or how they are shaped...

South Asia has long been synonymous with persistent and unusually high rates of child undernutrition — the so-called Asian enigma. Yet contrary to this stereotype, Bangladesh has managed to sustain a rapid reduction in the rate of child undernutrition for at least two decades. In this paper we...

Social protection programs are primarily focused on influencing household behavior in the short term, increasing consumption to reduce poverty and food insecurity, and promoting investments in human capital. A large body of evidence across numerous settings shows that cash and food transfer...