Sri Lanka is an island nation with a population of 20 million. In 2012, per capita income was US $2,923. From 2003 to 2012, the economy grew at 6.4 percent annually. Post-conflict, growth increased to 8 percent in May 2009. The private sector drove growth together with public reconstruction in...

Nepal has made a remarkable progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially in extreme poverty and education. Nepal has achieved MDG 5 but only one in three births is attended by skilled medical personnel. Disparities exist in access to maternal care by residence and...

Although there is a widespread belief that scaling up HIV voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) programs in Africa will have large prevention benefits through reductions in risk behaviors, these claims are difficult to establish from existing evaluations of VCT. Considerations from behavioral...

This paper uses data collected from a retrospective pre-test to investigate he impact that a financial education program has on participants’ financial behaviors. Specifically, we compare program impact across participants with varying levels of financial competency prior to the program and...

In the immediate post conflict period, Afghanistan's health services were in a deplorable and chaotic state. Access and utilization of reproductive health services and skilled care during pregnancy, childbirth, and the first month after delivery are key to saving those women at risk of dying due...

Policies to encourage pro-environmental behaviors must be based on an understanding of the factors that affect it: the literature has identified a role for information, attitudes, moral norms and several socio-demographic characteristics. Pro-environmental behaviors are however not homogeneous...

This study showed that modeling of future behavioral change in CEA of a behavioral intervention further strengthened the results of the standard CEA. Ultimately, modeling future behavioral change could have important consequences for health policy development in general and the adoption of...

Like commercial marketing, social marketing uses the 4 “Ps” and seeks exchange of value between the marketer and consumer. Behaviors such as handwashing, and products such as those for oral rehydration treatment (ORT), can be marketed like commercial products in developing countries....

In many settings in Africa, social marketing has proven more successful in generating brand recognition for chlorine water treatment products than in promoting their use. To promote household use of one such product in Malawi, WaterGuard, the Ministry of Health (MOH) and Population Services...

This article provides a comprehensive review of theory and research on the individual-level predictors of household energy usage. Drawing on literature from across the social sciences, we examine two broad categories of variables that have been identified as potentially important for explaining...