This study uses a new survey of households in rural Central Java to assess the nutritional impact of Indonesia’s drought and financial crisis of 1997/98. Applying an econometric approach that distinguishes between time, age, and cohort effects to a data set with more frequent time observations...

This paper reviews donor experience with the design of development projects that are sensitive to gender-specific constraints. The review finds that the gap between intentions and implementation as regards gender-sensitivity is larger in agriculture than in health and nutrition. One of the...

The paper presents a new composite indicator - the poverty and hunger index (PHI) - to measure countries' performance toward achieving millennium development goal No.1 (MDG1) on halving poverty and hunger by 2015. Building on the statistical structure of the human development index, the PHI...

Based on a review of case studies from developing countries this paper argues that global assessments of land degradation should be interpreted with care. On the one hand, degradation is not a linear process that can easily be measured by static parameters. Positive environmental outcomes are...

The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), together with the World Food Programme of the United Nations (WFP), administers one of the largest microfinance initiatives in the world. Reaching around 450,000 women in each 18-month cycle, the Income Generation for Vulnerable Group...

The Millennium Development Goal No. 1 (MDG-1) aims to halve the number of people affected by poverty and hunger by 2015. Poverty and hunger are closely related overlapping phenomena, but they are not identical. Each affects different sets of people or countries in different ways, and their...