Key to achieving national targets under a devolved set-up is the capacity of the entire system to implement health and nutrition programs at scale. This requires coordinated efforts among the Local Government Units (LGUs) with the same energy and commitment. Though still few relative to the...

This study reports on the situational analysis conducted for Zamboanga del Norte as part of a larger study that aims to inform the development of strategies to improve early childhood care and development outcomes in KOICA-UNICEF intervention sites. A critical assessment of several underlying...

Despite the Philippines’ sustained economic growth, persistently high malnutrition remains to be a significant issue in the country, especially in a number of subnational regions. This clearly illustrates the urgent need to examine the formulation and delivery of health and nutrition...

We assess the short-term impacts of the Doctors-to-the-Barrios (DTTB), a national physician deployment program in the Philippines that augments the supply of rural healthcare workers in underserved areas, on several health sector outcomes. Using regression discontinuity design, we find that the...

Commodity market fluctuations have been linked with a number of adult outcomes. Recent evidence on the lasting impact of early life conditions, however, suggests that the effects on children may be important as well. Using large spatio-temporal variations in rice prices in the Philippines as a...

The Philippines recently introduced two distinct but related large-scale social protection programs that, first, provides conditional cash transfers (CCT) to poor households, and, second, automatically enrolls them into the government's social health insurance program. This has resulted to...

The 2018 PISA results revealed that the Philippines ranked close to the bottom in reading, mathematics, and science but ranked at the top in terms of bullying in school. Analyses of PISA 2018 data found that bullying has a negative effect on school performance. This study uses longitudinal data...

Which children benefit from conditional cash transfers (CCT)? Using a sample of poor and near-poor households in the Philippines, we show that children in households that receive cash transfers from 4Ps, the country's flagship anti-poverty program, have parents with relatively low educational...