Over the past two decades, many Latin American countries have expanded the economic protection of older adults by developing non-contributory pensions or making eligibility rules more flexible. These policies have addressed long-standing coverage gaps in Latin American pension systems and...

The provision of a universal old age pension is increasingly recognized as an important instrument for strengthening and extending social protection. A growing number of emerging economies, including East African countries, are introducing universal old age pensions to guarantee at least a basic...

This paper looks at the prospects of a demographic dividend in Africa in the near future. While acknowledging that the fertility declines which change population age structures and thus dependency ratios have been slow to begin and often seem to have stalled once they have begun, we nevertheless...

We use a randomized community development programme in rural Pakistan to assess the impact of citizen engagement on public service delivery and maternal and child health outcomes. The programme had a strong focus on ensuring the participation of women. Women in the study villages had also...

South Asia has the highest rate of child malnutrition in the world, despite rapid economic growth compared to other regions such as sub-Saharan Africa. Known as the 'South Asian enigma' this feature is partly attributed to the low status of women in South Asian societies. This paper examines...

Understanding chronic poverty and its evolution is complex given the amount of information involved. This paper proposes a new approach to analysing the evolution of chronic poverty in a multivariate setting using a Shapley decomposition of a multidimensional chronic poverty measure proposed by...

We conducted a systematic review to identify policy interventions that improve education quality and student learning in developing countries. Relying on a theory of change typology, we highlight three main drivers of change of education quality: first, supply-side capability interventions that...

Every person desires some level of inner fulfilment at different stages of life and this could come from a combination of several factors including material and resource acquisition and social prestige. The challenge, however, is whether happiness levels across the different social strata are...

This paper discusses past and current social policy strategies in the international aid architecture. From the 1990s, aid strategy and policy shifted to put a stronger emphasis on human development. This accelerated with the Millennium Development Goals and will continue under the Sustainable...