Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) is a large-scale social protection intervention aimed at improving food security and stabilizing asset levels. The PSNP contains a mix of public works employment and unconditional transfers. It is a well-targeted program; however, several years...

Undernutrition remains a major source of human suffering and an obstacle to national economic and human development in many African countries. This report investigates undernutrition's persistence, drawing on case studies of the public response to the problem in Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, and...

Interventions aimed at increasing water availability for livelihood and domestic activities have great potential to improve various determinants of undernutrition, such as the quantity and diversity of foods consumed within the household, income generation, and women’s empowerment. However,...

The triple burden of malnutrition is growing in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Increasing access to affordable ultra-processed foods in the food environment is contributing to this problem. While existing explanations for this triple burden of malnutrition have examined demand-side...

Weather shocks and other shocks affecting the economy of farm households often trigger a cascade of coping mechanisms, from reducing food consumption to selling assets, with potentially lasting consequences on child development. In polygynous households (in which a man is married to several...

Reducing undernutrition requires improving access to goods and services from a wide range of economic and social sectors, including agriculture, education and health. Yet despite broad agreement on the multisectoral nature of the global burden of undernutrition, relatively little research has...

Agricultural development has historically focused on poverty reduction and food security but is now increasingly asked to help improve nutrition. Despite this strengthened nutritional mandate, agricultural policies and programs have struggled to develop effective, scalable and cost-effective...

South Asia has long been synonymous with persistent and unusually high rates of child undernutrition — the so-called Asian enigma. Yet contrary to this stereotype, Bangladesh has managed to sustain a rapid reduction in the rate of child undernutrition for at least two decades. In this paper we...

Over the past 25 years, economic growth rates in many developing countries have outpaced those in industrialized countries, and per capita incomes of these two groups of countries have started to converge. Growth in developing countries contributed to a dramatic drop — from 37 percent to 13...

South Africa has signed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and placed poverty and inequality reduction at the forefront of its National Development Plan. This study links a nonparametric income distribution (micro) simulation model and an economywide general equilibrium (macro) model to...