This report presents policy background, institutional arrangements and innovations related to linking social protection programmes and productive inclusion instruments, specifically for Chile, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, and the Philippines.

The book Production, Protection, Promotion: Exploring Sinergies Between Social Protection and Productive Development in Latin America constitutes a compilation of the main results obtained throughout the project lifespan from its inception to its culmination in 2015. With the idea of establishing the existence of synergies in the region, CEDE, at the Universidad de los Andes School of Economics, coordinated and supervised the development of six assessments in different countries in the region.

Agriculture and social protection can complement and support each other in reducing hunger and poverty. On the one hand, agricultural interventions can promote growth in smallholder productivity by addressing structural constraints that limit the access of poor households to land and water resources, inputs, financial services, advisory services and markets.

The Integrating Extremely Poor Producers into Markets Field Guide (Field Guide) is intended to provide the field-level practitioner with tools and applications to impact extremely poor households. The intended outcome of the Field Guide is to increase market engagement for extremely poor households, especially women, through value chain and market systems development activities.

This document presents information collected by CGAP and its partners over July-October 2016 on 55 current and new graduation programs implemented globally. The data was either self-reported by the implementing partner or was collected by interviews with CGAP staff. Comparing this data to the previous information collection (December 2015) shows that efforts to extend economic opportunities to the poorest and most vulnerable populations are gaining traction among governments, donors, and NGOs interested in incorporating graduation-type programming into social protection systems.

What circumstances or behaviors turn poverty into a cycle that perpetuates across generations? The answer to this question carries especially important implications for the design and evaluation of policies and projects intended to reduce poverty. Yet a major challenge analysts and policymakers face in understanding poverty traps is the sheer number of mechanisms—not just financial, but also environmental, physical, and psychological—that may contribute to the persistence of poverty all over the world.

This paper demonstrates that there are potentially large returns to social protection policy that stakes out a productive safety net below the vulnerable and keeps them from slipping into a poverty trap. Much of the value of the productive safety net comes from mitigating the ex ante effects of risk and crowding in additional investment. The analysis also explores the implications of different mechanisms of targeting social protection transfers.

Graduation programmes aim to provide a sequenced and intensive package of support to very poor people, with the objective of facilitating their movement out of extreme poverty towards resilient and sustainable livelihoods. The package usually includes regular cash transfers, productive assets, access to savings facilities, livelihood training and coaching. The success of first generation ‘graduation model’ programmes in Bangladesh has prompted pilot projects in several countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Sub-Saharan Africa has just experienced one of the best decades of growth since the 1960s. Between 2000 and 2012, gross domestic product (GDP) grew more than 4.5 percent a year on average, compared to around 2 percent in the prior 20 years (World Bank various years). In 2012, the region's GDP growth was estimated at 4.7 percent- 5.8 percent if South Africa is excluded (World Bank 2013). About one-quarter of countries in the region grew at 7 percent or better, and several African countries are among the fastest growing in the world.

In a typical developing country, about 70 percent of workers and 30 percent of production are informal. Informality is a cause and a consequence of the lack of economic and institutional development. It implies productive inefficiency and a culture of evasion and noncompliance. Informality, however, exists because it offers the advantages of flexibility and employment in economies with low labor productivity and an excessive regulatory burden. Under these conditions, if there were no informality, there would be greater unemployment, poverty, and crime.

Standard measures of poverty may reveal nothing about whether the poorest of the poor are being lifted-up or left-behind, yet this is a widespread concern among policy makers and citizens. The paper assesses whether public spending on social protection benefits the poorest and hence lifts the floor, and what role economic development plays. Evidence is presented for the developing world and the US. Across developing countries, a higher mean income comes with a higher floor. The bulk of this income effect is direct rather than via higher spending on social protection.

Targeted interventions that sustainably improve the lives of the poor will be a critical component in eliminating extreme poverty by 2030. The poorest households tend to be physically and socially isolated and face disadvantages across multiple dimensions, which makes moving out of extreme poverty challenging and costly. This paper compares the cost-effectiveness of three strands of anti-poverty social protection interventions by reviewing 30 livelihood development programs, 11 lump-sum unconditional cash transfers, and seven graduation programs.

The promise of randomized controlled trials is that evidence gathered through the evaluation of a specific program helps us—possibly after several rounds of fine-tuning and multiple replications in different contexts—to inform policy. However, critics have pointed out that a potential constraint in this agenda is that results from small “proof-of-concept” studies run by nongovernment organizations may not apply to policies that can be implemented by governments on a large scale.

This book looks back both at how the Great Recession affected employment outcomes in developing countries and at how governments responded. The chapters bring together a unique compilation of data and analysis from very different sources, including an inventory of policies implemented during the crisis among countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. The overall story is that the impacts of the crisis varied considerably.

In 2008, Uganda granted hundreds of small groups $400/person to help members start individual skilled trades. Four years on, an experimental evaluation found grants raised earnings by 38% (Blattman, Fiala, Martinez 2014). We return after 9 years to find these start-up grants acted more as a kick-start than a lift out of poverty. Grantees' investment leveled off; controls eventually increased their incomes through business and casual labor; and so both groups converged in employment, earnings, and consumption. Grants had lasting impacts on assets, skilled work, and

This study investigates an attempt to economically and socially empower some of the poorest and most vulnerable young women in one of the poorest and most fragile places in the world: northern Uganda. Investing in women is said to be a key to development. Educate her, buy her a cow or goat, or help her start a business and great things will follow: sustained increases in income, greater empowerment and social inclusion, health and education for the children, and (especially in war-affected regions) mental health and happiness.

Standard economic theory suggests that one-time business grants can have at most temporary effects, and accordingly, policies to increase incomes of the self-employed in developing countries typically rely on sustained engagement. In contrast, we found long-lasting impacts from one-time grants given in a randomized experiment to subsistence firms.

Can greater control over earned income incentivize women to work and influence gender norms? In collaboration with Indian government partners, we provided rural women with individual bank accounts and randomly varied whether their wages from a public workfare program were directly deposited into these accounts or into the male household head’s account (the status quo). Women in a random subset of villages were also trained on account use.

People's well-being is a function not just their income but of their levels of 5 assets (human, natural, social, physical and financial), their vulnerability to stresses and shocks, and the impact of policies, institutions and processes. The paper draws on experience from South Africa in particular, but also from other African and international experience, to draw out lessons for improving the lives and livelihoods of poor people, as well as making them protagonists with agency and not just passive "beneficiaries" of development.

While there is a growing body of evidence surrounding the impact of financial inclusion and the importance of product design in achieving desired welfare impact outcomes, there remains much to learn about the ways in which formal financial products and services can contribute to women’s economic empowerment.