This paper evaluates a program targeted to adolescent girls in Tanzania that aims to empower them economically as well as socially. The program was found to be highly successful in Uganda in terms of economic, health, and social outcomes. In contrast, this evaluation finds that the program did...

Food assistance is one of the most common forms of safety net programs in postconflict situations. Besides the humanitarian and promotional roles, there are widespread scepticisms of food assistance regarding its possible influence on disincentive to work and on crowding out of private...

The world's poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-term randomized control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of...

We propose a model to study when an intermediate action can serve as a stepping stone that enables the elimination of a harmful norm. While the intermediate action may facilitate the first “step”, it may also become a new norm. We derive intuitive conditions for stepping stones, which depend...

There has been renewed interest and effort in recent years to adopt a multisectoral approach to address malnutrition in many countries. The government of Uganda, with technical support from the World Bank and financial support from the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), has...

Using data from a randomised experiment in Kenya, we estimate the causal effect of social networks on technology adoption. In this experiment, farmers were invited to information sessions about the use of Tissue Culture Banana (TCB), an in vitro banana cultivation technology. We find that an...