This paper examines the impact of rainfall shocks on a measure of adult health, body mass, drawing on a unique panel data set of households residing in rural Zimbabwe. Controlling for individual, household, and community factors, and individual fixed, unobservable effects, we find women, but not...

" This paper as exemplified by the Millennium Declaration of the United Nations, the reduction of poverty and hunger are now seen as central objectives of international development. Yet the modalities for attaining these goals are contested. Further, while it might be assumed that interventions...

Household food security is an important measure of well-being. Although it may not encapsulate all dimensions of poverty, the inability of households to obtain access to enough food for an active, healthy life is surely an important component of their poverty. Accordingly, devising an...

"Early childhood nutrition is thought to have important effects on education, broadly defined to include various forms of learning. We advance beyond previous literature on early childhood nut ition on education in developing countries by (1) using unique longitudinal data from a nutritional...

This paper examines the relationship between community participation and the efficacy of interventions designed to reduce poverty. We develop some simple analytics that are used to structure a review of the extant literature and motivate the analysis of the impact of participation on the...

"This study is part of a larger effort to explore the impact of agricultural research on poverty reduction. It examines the diffusion and impact of hybrid maize in selected resettlement areas of rural Zimbabwe, paying particular attention to varieties made widely available from the mid-1990s...

"Collective action can help individuals, groups, and communities achieve common goals, thus contributing to poverty reduction. Drawing on longitudinal household and qualitative community data, the authors examine the impact of shocks on household living standards, study the correlates of...

"This paper explores risk sharing in the Zone Lacustre, Mali, as viewed through the lens of consumption smoothing. We find that idiosyncratic shocks appear to have little impact on consumption, and that households respond to these shocks in a variety of ways. In general, nonpoor households are...

"The primary goal of emergency food aid after an economic shock is often to bolster short-term food and nutrition security. However, these transfers also act as insurance against other shock effects, such as destruction of assets and changes in economic activity, which can have lasting...

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...