Social safety net programs focus on a subset of the population, usually the poorest and most vulnerable. However, in most developing countries there is no administrative data on relative wealth of the population to support the selection process of the potential beneficiaries of the social safety...

This paper reviews a small community-based school feeding program launched in Togo in response to the 2007/08 food price crisis. The discussion focuses on the operational and policy lessons emerging from the program, to better understand opportunities for scale up and sustainability in the...

Poverty has been declining in Sub-Saharan Africa, but millions are still poor or vulnerable. To address this ongoing and complex problem, all countries in the region have now deployed social safety net programs as part of their core development plans. The number of programs has skyrocketed since...

Adaptive social protection (ASP) helps to build the resilience of poor and vulnerable households to the impacts of large, covariate shocks, such as natural disasters, economic crises, pandemics, conflict, and forced displacement. Through the provision of transfers and services directly to these...

From the Victorian poor laws in nineteenth century Britain to the post-war recovery of the 1940s, public works programs have historically played an important role as countercyclical interventions to address seasonal and short-term unemployment. In recent times, the role of public works has...

This paper offers a new set of data compiled from individual World Bank country reports and covering 87 developing and transition countries during 1996-2006. The findings show that mean spending on safety nets is 1.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and median spending is 1.4 percent of...

During FY 2002-2007 the World Bank engaged with 118 countries on social safety net (SSN) issues, providing lending in 68, analytic products in 86, training in 87, and a combined package of all three services in 42. A review of these safety net activities shows a strong diversity with respect to...

The paper aims to provide practitioners working on Social Safety Net (SSN) projects with practical ways to use information management practices to mitigate accountability and control risks. The paper outlines a Management Information System (MIS) framework for SSN projects, as well as...