This paper considers the evidence on the comparative extent to which faith-based civil society organizations (FB-CSOs) have benefited from increased funding related to the HIV/AIDS response in Africa. First, we review the literature on whether FB-CSOs have benefited from such funding, and find...

Faith-inspired institutions (FIIs) commonly have as their stated mission a desire to provide quality health services to all, and in particular a commitment to serve the poor, for example, by providing services in remote areas where there are none, or by making services more affordable for those...

This paper uses recent household survey data for Cameroon to measure the cost for households of the education services that their children receive and assess how this cost varies according to the type of service provider. Contrary to what has been observed in some other countries, the data...

World cotton prices have been declining in the past decade and farmers in West and Central Africa have been especially hard hit. This has led to heated policy debates and difficult trade-offs for governments, as their desire to help producers is constrained by the need to avoid large subsidies...

Unlike Mexico as a whole, the south (that is, the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca) may well not reach many of the MDGs. The objective of this paper is to document this assertion and discuss some of the constraints toward reaching the MDGs, as well as some initiatives recently taken to...

There are often large regional differences in poverty and other social indicators within a country. But geographic poverty profiles based on household surveys tend to be limited to broad areas because survey sample sizes are too small to permit analysts to construct valid estimates of poverty at...

This short dissemination note provides a synthesis of key results from a recent study on access to infrastructure services in Africa. Using Demographic and Health Surveys from 22 countries that have conducted at least two such surveys between 1990 and 2005, we provide comparable estimates over...

Several sub-Saharan African countries have succeeded at increasing their economic growth rate in recent years, and this has translated into substantial poverty reduction according to objective measures based on household survey data. At the same time, many people do not feel that the poverty...

Fe y Alegría is a catholic network of schools that started operations in Colombia in 1971, and in 2009 served more than 72,000 students in 61 schools. This paper assesses the performance of Fe y Alegría secondary schools in Colombia using test scores for Spanish and mathematics, as well as...

The issue of whether faith-inspired providers are able to reach the poor depends in part on the cost of the health services provided. This paper relies on recent nationally representative household surveys for sub-Saharan African countries to assess to what extent the cost of healthcare is a...