This paper presents evidence from Rwanda's Girinka ('One Cow per Poor Family') program that has distributed more than 130,000 livestock asset transfers in the form of cows to the rural poor since 2006. Supply side constraints on the programe results in some beneficiaries receiving complementary...

This study evaluates an intervention in the dairy subsector by an Indian livelihood promotion institution and conducts a detailed analysis of the main cost and benefit factors of the activity. Two rounds of data are available which allows for the comparison of impacts and costs and benefits...

Although microfinance institutions across the world are moving from group lending towards individual lending, this strategic shift is not substantiated by sufficient empirical evidence on the impact of both types of lending on borrowers. We present such evidence from a randomised field...

We use an RCT to analyse the impact of microcredit on poverty reduction in Bosnia. The study population are loan applicants that would normally have just been rejected based on regular screening. We find that access to credit allowed borrowers to start and expand small-scale businesses....

In a recent paper, Anagol, Etang and Karlan (2013) consider the income generated by these owning a cow or a buffalo in two districts of Uttar Pradesh, India. The net profit generated ignoring labour costs, gives rise to a small positive rate of return. Once any reasonable estimate of labour...

Poor sanitation is an important policy issue facing India, which accounts for over half of the 1.1 billion people worldwide that defecate in the open [JMP, 2012]. Achieving global sanitation targets, and reducing the social and economic costs of open defecation, therefore requires effectively...

We study the effectiveness of a community-level information and mobilization intervention to reduce open defecation (OD) and increase sanitation investments in Nigeria. The results of a cluster-randomized control trial in 246 communities, conducted between 2014 and 2018, suggest that average...

Many children in developing countries grow up in unstimulating environments, leading to deficiencies in early years' developmental outcomes, particularly cognition and language. Interventions to improve parenting in the first 3 years of life have a clear impact on these outcomes, but the...

Credit constraints are considered to be an important barrier hindering adoption of preventive health investments among low-income households in developing countries. However, it is not obvious whether, and the extent to which, the provision of labelled micro-credit (where the loan is linked to...

The low take-up of cost-effective and highly subsidised preventive health technologies in low-income countries remains a puzzle. One under-studied reason is that the design of subsidy schemes is such that households remain financially constrained. In this paper we analyse whether, and how,...