This paper investigates whether inferences drawn about a population are sensitive to the manner by which those data are obtained. It compares information obtained using participatory appraisal techniques with a survey of households randomly drawn from a locally administered census that had been...

The world's population, today numbering some 5.5 billion people, may approach 12 billion by the end of the next century. By the year 2020, 26 years from today, it will most likely have increased by about 2.5 billion to a total of 8 billion people, an increase of nearly 100 million a year. Over...

In most developing countries, it is the private, informal markets that the rural poor have traditionally turned to service their financial needs. Why have these institutions succeeded in providing services to the poor when formal institutions have not? Do these informal institutions provide any...

For poor rural families in developing countries, access to credit and savings facilities has the potential to make the difference between grinding poverty and an economically secure life. Well-managed savings facilities permit households to build up funds for future investment or consumption....

This policy brief summarizes lessons learned from IFPRI's multicountry program on rural finance and household food security with regard to the poors' demand for financial services. The lessons are derived from detailed household surveys conducted in nine countries of Asia and Africa: Bangladesh,...

The role of school quality in determining educational outcomes has received much research attention in the United States. However, in developing countries, where a significant part of the school age population never attends school, policymakers must consider both quality and quantity when...

This article examines the degree to which child malnutrition, infectious disease, and mortality, as well as poverty, overcrowding, substandard housing, and lack of access to basic services, tend to concentrate in particularly disadvantaged neighborhoods in developing country cities. Findings are...

In this paper we investigate whether a conditional cash transfer program such as the Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA) can simultaneously combat the problems of low school attendance and child work. PROGRESA is a new program of the Mexican government aimed at...

Data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for five Latin American countries (seven data sets) were used to explore the feasibility of creating a composite feeding index and to examine the association between feeding practices and child height-for-age (HAZ). Urban/rural differences were...

This paper presents a new methodological framework for measuring the level of household access to credit. It provides an analytical framework for examining the determinants of household credit limits and derives implications on information needed to examine the extent to which households are...