Aurino, Elisabetta; Tranchant, Jean-Pierre; Diallo, Amadou Sekou; and Gelli, Aulo. 2018. School feeding or general food distribution? Quasi-experimental evidence on the educational impacts of emergency food assistance during conflict in Mali. Innocenti Working Papers no. 2018-04. Innocenti, Florence: UNICEF Office of Research. https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/956-school-feeding-or-general-food-distribution-quasi-experimental-evidence-on-the-educational.html
In April-May, we released 5 new short videos aiming to answer the question, Why is social protection important for agriculture and resilience? Daniel Gilligan (Flagship 4 leader) makes an introduction to the Flagship 4 research agenda discussing why social protection programs, such as cash transfers, food rations, school meals, and public works are now a leading strategy that governments use to help reduce poverty and help households to become more resilient.
Harold Alderman discusses how social protection transfer programs can be improved, how researchers can help in design of such programs, and, finally, what else social protection programs need if they are to go beyond poverty alleviation and become graduation programs as well.
Shalini Roy explains with great examples from Bangladesh how transfer programs can affect nutrition and gender relations in a household, and what role behavior change communication has to play.
Sheri Arnott (World Vision) and Bart Minten (IFPRI) talk about the great work that our IFPRI team and partners have been doing to support the implementation of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme.
From March 4-April 7, 2018, IFPRI’s Policy Research and Strategy Support Program (PRSSP) supervised the survey enumerator training for the study, “Assessing the Sustainability of Impacts of Safety Net Transfer Modalities in Bangladesh: Four-Year Follow-Up Survey”, which trained enumerators from the local survey firm DATA on conducting the household surveys, child assessments (including the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, Early Grade Reading Assessment, and Early Grade Mathematics Assessment), and anthropometric measurement. On April 3, enumerators pre-tested the questionnaires in Manikganj District. The survey was conducted from April 8-May 15. Data analysis is ongoing. [Co-Principal Investigators: Akhter Ahmed, Melissa Hidrobo, John Hoddinott, Shalini Roy]
The Egypt Takaful and Karama Program (TKP) evaluation team (includes PIM/IFPRI colleagues Dan Gilligan, Clemens Breisinger, Sikandra Kurdi, and Naureen Karachiwalla) presented findings from the final qualitative and quantitative evaluation reports of the program to the World Bank and the Ministry of Social Solidarity in Egypt at the Midterm Review Workshop on May 21 and to the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Egypt on June 12.
On May 22, Naureen Karachiwalla presented findings from her study Educator incentives and educational triage in rural primary schools at IFPRI seminar. In Uganda, as in many other African countries, a primary leaving exam rations access to secondary school and the high stakes placed on this exam creates incentives to engage in educational triage (only focus on bright students, encourage students to drop out so they cannot take the exam). Dr. Karachiwalla presented evidence on how a scheme designed to reward teachers for the performance of all of their students can reduce dropouts and improve achievement for students across the ability distribution and reduces triage.
John Hoddinott (co-authors - Akhter Ahmed and Shalini Roy) presented findings of an analysis of the impact of different transfer modalities and nutrition behavior change communication on the pre-school children’s nutritional status in Bangladesh at IFPRI seminar on May 29.
