Marital shocks are exceedingly common for women in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper investigates whether women who have suffered a marital rupture experience lower welfare levels relative to married women in their first union. Conditional means for women's nutritional status are compared by marital...

This paper is motivated by two stylized facts about poverty in Africa: female-headed households tend to be poorer, and poverty has been falling in the aggregate since the 1990s. These facts raise two questions: How have female-headed households fared? And what role have they played in Africa's...

Antipoverty policies assume that targeting poor households suffices in reaching poor individuals. We question this assumption. Our comprehensive assessment for sub-Saharan Africa reveals that undernourished women and children are spread widely across the household wealth and consumption...

Antipoverty policies in developing countries often assume that targeting poor households will be reasonably effective in reaching poor individuals. This paper questions this assumption, using nutritional status as a proxy for individual poverty. The comprehensive assessment for Sub-Saharan...