Girls completing primary schooling in Cote d'Ivoire are less likely to go to secondary schools because of inferior performance in the examination used to ration access. The gender gap in educational achievement varies with household economic status, with poverty inhibiting girls' performance...

Absolute poverty lines are often derived from the cost of obtaining sufficient calories. Where staples vary across regions, such poverty lines may differ depending on whether they are set using national or regional food baskets. Regional poverty lines are open to the objection that they may be...

Health care and status are jointly modeled using household data from Kenya. Both maternal primary education and distance to health facilities affect take-up of child health care, but the former is more powerful. Corrections for the selectivity of illness when modeling health demand are...

Ethiopia's Food Security Programme provides income transfers through public works in its Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) as well as targeted services provided through the Other Food Security Programme (OFSP) and, later, the Household Asset Building Programme (HABP) designed to improve...

We examine the determinants of current enrolment status and relative grade attainment among primary school children in rural Ethiopia. We use repeated cross-sectional data from 15 rural villages in Ethiopia to capture the impact of changing household and child characteristics on enrolment status...

This paper examines the determinants of migrants' remittances in Kenya. Drawing on data from Central Province, it compares four econometric specifications of the remittance function, finding that failing to account for truncation, sample selection and identification leads to misleading estimates...

This paper examines the relationship between community participation and the efficacy of interventions designed to reduce poverty. It outlines a simple model that identifies three actors involved in the provision of antipoverty interventions: financiers, providers and beneficiaries. This model...

This paper examines consumption smoothing in the Zone Lacustre, Mali, a poor region in one of the poorest countries in the world. Idiosyncratic shocks appear to have little impact on consumption. A stronger test of consumption smoothing shows that controlling for covariate shocks, changes in...

Schooling has externality effects in agriculture when, in the course of conducting their own private economic activities, educated farmers raise the productivity of their uneducated neighbours. This paper seeks to determine the potential size and source of such benefits for rural areas of...