Can digital payments help reduce extreme hunger? Humanitarian needs are at their highest since 1945, aid budgets are falling behind, and hunger is concentrating in fragile states where repression and aid diversion present major obstacles. In such contexts, partnering directly with governments is...

Can digital payments systems help reduce extreme hunger? Humanitarian needs are at their highest since 1945, aid budgets are falling behind, and hunger is concentrating in fragile states where repression and aid diversion present major obstacles. In such contexts, partnering with governments is...

The task of ending famine in India was taken up by many at the beginning of the twentieth century. Only decades earlier, famine in India had been believed to be a necessary evil. Now it was the reason for the increasing activities of doctors, nutritionists, social reformers, agricultural...

Scholars have long observed that states play off overlapping international institutions against one another in an effort to advance their policy objectives. This article identifies a strategy utilized by the EU in response to regime complexity that I term “backdoor bargaining.” Unlike...

We analyze the role played by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in alleviating or exacerbating inequality across racial and ethnic groups in food expenditures and in the resources needed to meet basic food needs (the "food resource gap"). To do this, we propose a simple...

We decompose the relationship between food aid and conflict into the channels through which food aid can affect conflict. We address questions of methodological choice and estimation techniques for empirical studies. Our review of the empirical evidence on the effect of food aid on conflict...

Many community organizations provide services similar to government programs, but there is limited evidence how increased government aid affects the use and availability of charitable services. This study examines how greater access to federal nutrition assistance through schoolwide free meal...

Using a high-frequency mobile phone survey of food security conducted by the World Food Programme, this paper investigates how food assistance and access to food changed following the announcement of famine-like conditions in the Republic of Yemen. Among the mobile phone-using population, the...

The Republic of Yemen has undergone a profound transformation following the escalation of conflict in March 2015. There has been an increase in violence, a disruption in supply chains due to a tightening of the ports, and a decline in the general economic climate that has left a large share of...

Motivated by a recent setback in the fight against child malnutrition, this study explores whether aid projects help to reduce stunting, or impaired growth, among children in the local area. Focusing on Malawi, a country with very high stunting prevalence and for which we have access to...

North Korea is a complex humanitarian emergency with food insecurity at its core. As of August 2022, both quantity and price data point to a deteriorating situation, made worse by the regime's self-isolating response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Food availability has likely...

This paper adds to the growing body of knowledge in media and foreign aid. We aim to determine whether the impact of media-led US aid allocation applies universally to any foreign aid or specific to certain aid types. This paper's contribution is that we created three new media variables and use...

This book is a historical review of international food and agriculture since the founding of the international organizations following the Second World War, including the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and into the...

From 1997 through early 2003, the United Nations Oil for Food Program allowed Iraq to export oil in exchange for humanitarian supplies. We measure the extent to which this program was corrupted by Iraq's attempts to deliberately set the price of its oil below market prices in an effort to...

Zimbabwe’s social policy response to Covid-19 unfolded in a context of enduring socioeconomic and political crises. Its main instruments were temporary food relief and cash transfers, though it also included healthcare measures, an economic stimulus package, pension benefits, and “cushioning...

The Food for Education (FFE) program was introduced to Bangladesh in 1993. This paper evaluates the effect of this program on school participation and duration of schooling using a household survey data collected in 2000, after 7 years of operation of the program. Using propensity score matching...

Global food aid is considered a critical consumption smoothing mechanism in many countries. However, its record of stabilizing consumption has been mixed. This paper examines the cyclical properties of food aid with respect to food availability in recipient countries, with a view to assessing...

The importance of children’s nutritional status for subsequent human capital formation, the limited evidence of the effectiveness of social protection interventions on child nutrition, and the absence of knowledge on the intra-household impacts of cash and food transfers or how they are shaped...

It has been envisaged that Sub-Saharan Africa would remain the region with the highest level of food insecurity over the 2015-2025 period. This study, therefore, further investigates food insecurity and food imports in some selected African countries. The regression results based on the fixed...

In the Art of War, Sun Tzu (1772) observes that “the line between order and disorder lies in logistics”. The logistics response to the Asian tsunami in December 2004 reveals the fragility and inadequacy of the logistics processes. High volatility is part of complex situation, but other...