Middle childhood (approximately 6-12 years old) is a crucial time for developing cognitive and socio emotional competencies, and economic crises can affect children's development with long-lasting consequences for adolescence and adulthood. This note provides an overview of how economic shocks...

This paper reviews key issues in the'cash versus food'debate, including as they relate to political economy, theory, evidence, and practice. In doing so, it benefited from a new generation of 12 impact evaluations deliberately comparing alternative transfer modalities. Findings show that...

This document presents an analysis of pension coverage trends in Latin America for the past decades. Its preparation involved the collection, revision, and processing of household surveys in over 18 countries in the region, spanning a period of almost 40 years in some cases. The main goal of...

Throughout the developing world there is a growing demand for advice on the design of policies to facilitate access of the most vulnerable individuals to jobs, while reducing their dependency from public income support schemes. Even though these policies are common to both the activation and...

Adolescence is a demanding and critical period in life. Failure to meet certain developmental milestones can have serious short- and long-term implications for the individual and society at large. This note provides an overview of how economic shocks can affect adolescent development, and how...

The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste is a young, post-conflict nation endowed with significant oil revenues. Timor-Leste has one of the highest birth rates in the world (2.41 percent population growth) with over 44 percent of the population below 15 years of age (Timor-Leste Census, 2010)....

The recently released United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) social protection strategic framework and the World Bank social protection and labor strategy call for taking a systems approach to social protection as a way to help countries, communities, families and...

This paper presents an assessment of the first phase (2008?2009) of Sierra Leone's cash for work program based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis examining program design features, mainprocesses and impact. The assessment highlights that while cash for work was an appropriate crisis...

Cash transfers have proliferated in the past decade as key policy instruments to tackle vulnerability and inequality. Payment mechanisms (PMs), the backbone of cash transfers, are the channels through which cash travels from the funding source to the hands of beneficiaries. In theory, the...

This report shows that while more inclusive growth is the ultimate solution to poverty in Lesotho, the country can and should use selective social transfers to reduce poverty more rapidly among the extreme poor. But because the majority of the transfers are received by people who are not among...