"...Today, 1.1 billion people live on less than one US dollar per day (the internationally recognized poverty threshold)—430 million in South Asia, 325 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 260 million in East Asia and the Pacific, and 55 million in Latin America. Too many children live lives...

As HIV and AIDS simultaneously undermine livelihoods and household and community safety nets, families are especially vulnerable to poverty, food insecurity, and threats to their children’s nutrition, health, and education, with irreversible consequences. With more than 33.3 million people...

The authors of this book identify the factors affecting land inheritance and schooling across generations in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Ghana-countries with very different social and cultural traditions. Based on household surveys at each site, the authors examine how these factors affect...

Public Expenditures, Growth, and Poverty assesses the efficacy of poverty reduction programs in Latin America, Africa, and Asia by synthesizing studies conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute over the past ten years. Overall, the studies find that investments in...

"This paper uses panel data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Malawi to examine the impacts of disasters on dynamic human capital production. Our empirical results show that accumulation of biological human capital prior to a disaster helps children maintain investments during the post-disaster...

The global financial crisis has intensified the problems of over-indebtedness, especially for the poor. In this context, the microfinance industry is giving more attention to building their customers’ financial capabilities, designing products that respond to their needs and preferences, and...

"This paper uses household panel and village census data from Indonesia to examine the impact of spatial connectivity (road) development on household income growth and nonagricultural labor supply. The empirical results show that the impacts of improvements in local road quality (which...

"The objective of this study is to attempt to characterize the influence and impact of IFPRI in relation to the Mexican PROGRESA/Oportunidades anti-poverty and human resource program with its conditional cash transfers (CCT)—conditional on specific investments in education, health, and...

CONTENTS: Brief 1. Overview / Agnes R. Quisumbing and Ruth S. Meinzen-Dick Brief 2. Land Rights / Eve Crowley Brief 3. Water Rights / Barbara Van Koppen Brief 4. Rights to Livestock / Beth A. Miller Brief 5. Technology / Thelma R. Paris, Hilary Sims Feldstein, and Guadalupe Duron Brief 6....

The number of higher-education institutions and the students enrolled in them has grown rapidly throughout Africa since the early 1960s. The number of universities increased from less than 20 in 1960 to nearly 160 by 1996; student numbers grew from 119,000 to almost two million over the same period,...