In this paper, the authors investigate the effect of positive income shocks on the mental health of adolescent girls using experimental evidence from a cash transfer program in Malawi. They find that the provision of monthly cash transfers had a strong beneficial impact on the mental health of...

Disability and poverty are dynamic and intricately linked phenomena. In developed countries, a large body of empirical research shows that persons with disabilities experience inter alia comparatively lower educational attainment, lower employment and higher unemployment rates, worse living...

This paper proposes two measures for assessing the impact of interventions on the lives of disabled people, the Activity Limitation Score (ALS) and the Participation restriction Score (PRS). These measures are closely linked to the World Health Organization's (WHO's) International Classification...

Handwashing with soap, which has been shown to reduce diarrhea in young children by as much as 48 percent, is frequently mentioned as one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to save children's lives. Yet rates of handwashing remain very low throughout the world. Handwashing with soap...

Argentina's Plan Nacer provides insurance for maternal and child health care to uninsured families. The program allocates funding to provinces based on enrollment of beneficiaries and adds performance incentives based on indicators of the use and quality of maternal and child health care...

The association between hygiene, sanitation, and health is well documented, yet thousands of children die each year from exposure to contaminated fecal matter. At the same time, evidence on the effectiveness of at-scale behavior change interventions to improve sanitation and hygiene practices is...

HIV-prevention strategies have yielded only limited success so far in slowing down the AIDS epidemic. This paper examines novel intervention strategies that use incentives to discourage risky sexual behaviors. Widely-adopted conditional cash transfer programs that offer payments conditioning on...

Substantial declines in infant and under-5 mortality have taken place in recent years in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Kenya's infant mortality rate has fallen by 7.6 percent per year, the fastest rate of decline among the 20 countries in the region for which recent Demographic and...

This paper exploits the staggered rollout of Vietnam’s hospital autonomization policy to estimate its impacts on several key health sector outcomes including hospital efficiency, use of hospital care, and out-of-pocket spending. The authors use six years of panel data covering all Vietnam’s...

This study on the implementation efficiency of the HIV/AIDS national response in Colombia seeks to examine how it has been implemented -- whether it has been done according to the available evidence about the epidemic and as the response was originally planned. The study approaches three...