This evaluation assesses the impact of the government-funded Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project on poverty and women’s empowerment. The project, also known as Jeevika, uses self-help groups and village organisations to link poor rural women to formal financial institutions to avail credit.

The impact of micro-credit interventions on existing credit markets is theoretically ambiguous. Previous empirical work suggests the entry of a joint-liability lender may lead to a positive impact on the informal lending rate. This paper presents the first randomized controlled trial–based evidence on this question. Households in rural Bihar, India, were offered low-cost credit through a government-led self-help group program, the rollout of which was randomized at the panchayat level.

Policymakers typically try to address youth unemployment in developing countries through either active labor market programs (ALMPs) or labor-intensive public works programs (LIPWs). We examine whether there is any additional benefit for unemployed youth from participating in a comprehensive ALMP compared to a LIPW. We exploit an unanticipated intervention in the largest employment program in Papua New Guinea, which resulted in one intake of the program completing a LIPW and missing out on a comprehensive ALMP.

The Chars Livelihoods Programme (CLP) is a major programme delivering a mix of welfare
and development support to extremely poor households living on low-lying temporary sand
islands (called chars) on the Jamuna River in Northern Bangladesh. The first programme,
CLP-1, ran from 2004-2010 and was funded by the UK Department for International
Development (DFID). It was succeeded by a second programme, CLP-2, in 2010, with the

Among active labor market programs, job training is popular in Latin America as an attempt to help the labor market insertion of disadvantaged youth, and also as a way of providing skills to low-income groups to enable them to deal with the challenges of globalization. This paper summarizes the findings from the first rigorous set of evaluations to job training programs in Latin America that were made in the context of a project undertaken by the Office of Evaluation and Oversight at the Inter-American Development Bank.

Few culturally congruent interventions are available to reduce abusive practices in families living in abject poverty in francophone West Africa. This study tests the effects of economic intervention-alone and in combination with a family-focused component-on parenting outcomes and children's reports of violence in rural Burkina Faso.

This article describes a multifaceted livelihood program that provided ultra-poor households in seven low- and middle-income countries with a productive asset, training, regular coaching, access to savings, and consumption support led to large and lasting impacts on their standard of living.

Cash transfers and index insurance have become popular interventions by development agencies worldwide, yet surprisingly little is known about these programs' comparative impacts on participant behavior or well-being. This paper exploits exogenous variation in program participation and panel data from Kenya to compare the causal impacts of a cash transfer program (HSNP) and an index-based insurance product (IBLI), which were implemented contemporaneously among the same population. We find that both programs benefit clients.

Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, poverty alleviation programmes have struggled to reach the ultra-poor. To address this challenge, a growing number of agencies are adopting a ‘graduation approach’ to moving out of extreme poverty into food security and sustainable livelihoods. This study examines the effects of an integrated graduation programme (combining the economic strengthening component with the child well-being sensitisation component) on the economic well-being of women and households in the Nord region of Burkina Faso.

Purpose: This is the first randomized controlled trial in Burkina Faso testing the effect of economic strengthening alone and in combination with family coaching on child's hazardous work and work-related health outcomes. The study also tests the association between different forms of hazardous work and child's health outcomes.

This paper reviews in a systematic way the evidence on impact evaluations of active labour market programmes (ALMP), with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). It thus serves as a background paper for a more comprehensive project that the ILO’s Research Department is undertaking to assess the usage of and experience with active labour market programmes in the region. The paper starts with a description of the main types and key mechanisms of ALMP.

Authors of this report measure the impacts of the National Rural Livelihoods Programme on a range of household and individual level economic, social and empowerment outcomes and also assess the quality of institutions created by the programme.

While climate change is likely to increase weather risks in many developing countries, there is little evidence on effective policies to facilitate adaptation. This paper presents experimental evidence on a program in rural Nicaragua aimed at improving households’ risk-management through income diversification. The intervention targeted agricultural households exposed to weather shocks related to changes in rainfall and temperature patterns. It combined a conditional cash transfer with vocational training or a productive investment grant.

Cash transfer programs have become extremely popular in the developing world. There is a large literature on the effects of these programs on schooling, health and nutrition, but relatively little is known about possible impacts on child development. This paper analyzes the impact of a cash transfer program on cognitive development in early childhood in rural Nicaragua. Identification is based on random assignment. We show that children in households assigned to receive benefits had significantly higher levels of development nine mon ths after the program began.

Rural poverty, a widespread problem for the Paraguayan government over the last decade – as well as for other economies in the region – , led to the implementation, in 2016 and 2017, of the “Sembrando Oportunidades Familia por Familia” pilot program, an initiative based on the graduation approach to reduce the incidence of extreme poverty in rural areas. Evaluating the intervention results is essential to understand the effectiveness of this approach in reducing poverty in the Paraguayan context, where the government is in charge of its implementation.

Jobs are the number one policy concern of policy makers in many countries. The global financial crisis, rising demographic pressures, high unemployment rates, and concerns over automation all make it seem imperative that policy makers employ increasingly more active labor market policies. This paper critically examines recent evaluations of labor market policies that have provided vocational training, wage subsidies, job search assistance, and assistance moving to argue that many active labor market policies are much less effective than policymakers typically assume.

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs, started in the late 1990s in Latin America, have become the antipoverty program of choice in many developing countries in the region and beyond. This paper reviews the literature on their long-term impacts on human capital and related outcomes observed after children have reached a later stage of their life cycle, focusing on two life-cycle transitions. The first includes children exposed to CCTs in utero or during early childhood who have reached school ages.

BRAC launched its Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction: Targeting the Ultra Poor (CFPR-TUP) program in 2002 to address ultrapoverty in Bangladesh using an asset transfer approach combined with multifaceted training over a 2-year period. However, evidence of long-term employment trajectories is limited, and it is crucial to understand whether the program truly has a transformative long-term income effect. We evaluate the long-term impact of TUP on employment using difference-in-differences techniques on panel data from a 9-year period (2002–11).

Produciendo por Mi Futuro (PxMF) is a poverty-reduction intervention, implemented in Colombia by Prosperidad Social, which is based on the graduation programs initially developed by the BRAC Development Institute of Bangladesh and later by the Ford Foundation in eight countries around the world.

This document presents the results of the qualitative analysis on the understanding of well-being and the changes in life satisfaction, aspirations and expectations in the participants of the Produciendo por mi Futuro program in Colombia, a poverty-reduction intervention implemented by Prosperidad Social, that is based on the graduation programs developed initially by the BRAC Development Institute of Bangladesh. The qualitative analysis was carried out using the biographical method called Life Stories.