This final report presents the outcome of the “Thematic evaluation of EC support to the health sector”. It was commissioned by the Evaluation Unit of DG DEVCO and implemented between January 2011 and May 2012. The evaluation provides an independent assessment of the European Commission’s...

This evaluation was commissioned by the Evaluation Unit of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development. It evaluates the European Union’s (EU) Joint Programming process during the period 2011-2015. It covers all regions and countries of EU...

This document presents the preliminary findings from the quantitative data generation and analysis conducted as part of the project "Financial decision-making, gender and social norms in Zambia". Using a series of specially designed behavioural experiments,we generated an extensive set of...

In many sub-Saharan African countries, wild fruits offer great potential to serve as a nutritional complement and safety net in times of food shortages. However, their true contribution to food security is still insufficiently investigated. This study, therefore, examines the impact of wild...

This paper investigates the impacts of cotton marketing reforms on farm productivity, a key element for poverty alleviation, in rural Zambia. The reforms comprised the elimination of the Zambian cotton marketing board that was in place since 1977. Following liberalization, the sector adopted an...

This dissertation takes a welfare perspective to analyze how rural households in developing countries manage risks ex-ante and cope with shocks ex-post. The first part looks at risk-coping strategies and analyzes the socio-economic consequences of AIDS-related mortality in rural sub-Saharan...

Remarkably little is known about the long-term impacts of project aid to lagging poor areas (Chen, Mu et al. 2006, 2008). This paper contributes to the debate about the role of rural transport infrastructure development in explaining the long-term rural development. In line with Grimm and Klasen...

This paper tests the linkage between a binary treatment (rural road improvement project) and a continuous outcome (cotton productivity) in Zambia's agro-based Eastern Province as measured by repeated cross-sections of farm-level data from the Zambian post-harvest survey (PHS). We use this PHS...

This paper investigates the dynamic impacts of rural road improvements on farm productivity and crop choices in Zambia's Eastern Province. There are several channels through which the feeder road improvements impact on farmers. Our aim is to estimate whether the differential outcomes in the five...

The study examines Zambia's evolving aid relationship in relation to the country's democratic trajectory. The impact of aid in terms of democratic consolidation is linked to the development of the party system, the efficacy of key democratic institutions, and accountability in relation to...