Over the last decade, social safety nets (SSNs) have rapidly expanded in Africa, becoming a core strategy for addressing poverty, responding to shocks, increasing productivity and investing in human capital. Poverty, vulnerability and well-being have inherent gender dimensions, yet only recently...

This article assesses the impact of the East Asian financial crisis on farm households in two of the region's most affected countries. Indonesia and Thailand, using detailed household-level survey data collected before and after the crisis began. Although the nature of the shocks in the two...

Despite wide use of women's decisionmaking indicators, both as a direct measure of intrahousehold decisionmaking and as a proxy for women's empowerment or bargaining power, little has been done to explore what such indicators capture and how effective they measure program impacts on empowerment....

Adoption of productivity and income-enhancing agricultural technologies is conspicuously low in Africa south of the Sahara. Farmers' beliefs regarding the authenticity of agricultural inputs are important for explaining technology adoption: if farmers do not believe that inputs are genuine, they...

In low-income countries, primary school students often fall far below grade level and primary dropout rates remain high. Further, in some countries, educators encourage their weaker students to drop out before reaching the end of primary school. These educators hope to avoid the negative...

There is a general consensus that Food for Education (FFE) programs increase primary school participation. Although this view is widely held, there is limited causal evidence to support it. Moreover, little is known about how the design of FFE programs affects schooling outcomes. This paper...