As extreme weather events intensify due to climate change, it becomes ever more critical to understand how vulnerable households are to these events and the mechanisms households can rely on to minimize losses effectively. This paper analyzes the impacts of the floods that occurred during the...

Assets generate and help diversify income, provide collateral to access credit, alleviate liquidity constraints in the face of shocks, and are key inputs into empowerment. Despite the importance of individual-level data on asset ownership and control, and that most assets are owned by...

This paper documents the positive link between the noncognitive skills of women farmers and the adoption of a cash crop. The context is Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, where the majority of rural households practice subsistence farming. The analysis finds that a one standard...

It has long been recognized that household decision-making may not result in outcomes consistent with the unitary household model. Within the collective bargaining framework, consumption decisions would be driven by the spouse with greater bargaining power, while the outcomes would still be...

On October 15, 2015, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim announced the World Bank Group’s commitment to support the 78 poorest countries to implement a multi-topic household survey every three years between 2016 and 2030, for monitoring progress toward ending extreme poverty and boosting...

This study presents the findings from MEXA: Methodological Experiment on Measuring Asset Ownership from Gender Perspective. MEXA was implemented in 2014 by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics with support from the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) program and the United Nations...

Diversification into high-value cash crops among smallholders has been propagated as a strategy to improve welfare in rural areas. However, the extent to which cash crop production spurs projected gains remains an under-researched question, especially in the context of market imperfections...

This paper contributes to the long-standing debate on the merits of decentralized beneficiary targeting in the administration of development programs, focusing on the large-scale Malawi Farm Input Subsidy Program. Nationally-representative household survey data are used to systematically analyze...

In Africa, most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the African context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale -- a premise supported by the often...

In targeting poverty gains, sub-Saharan African governments have emphasized the alleviation of gender differences in agricultural productivity. The empirical studies on the gender gap, however, have frequently used data that were limited regarding geographic and topical coverage, and/or details...