Indonesia implemented an Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) program to help poor households overcome the adverse effects of a massive reduction in fuel subsidies from October 2005 to September 2006. It was one of the largest UCT in the world tackling fuel subsidies. About 19 million households benefited from the intervention. The program was reintroduced from June to December 2008 following another reduction in fuel subsidies. 
The project will offer a rigorous quantitative evaluation of the impact of the Indonesian UCT program on household welfare, poverty dynamics and other socioeconomic outcomes. It will also directly assess the equity and efficiency implications of using a cash transfer to compensate households after cutbacks in government subsidies for important commodities such as fuel. The study will use nationally representative longitudinal panel data on households.
Given the scope and size of the Indonesian government’s investment in this program, this study will fill a gap in understanding the effectiveness and impact of the program.

Adequate housing, along with food and clothing, is considered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a basic requirement for achieving a minimum living standard. Yet, inadequate housing, a primary characteristic of slum dwellers, is a problem facing 45% of the global urban population.
Despite the importance of housing, there is surprisingly little scientific evidence on the causal effects of housing programs on the welfare of beneficiary populations in low-income countries.
The project will fill this gap by evaluating the impact of providing inexpensive basic pre-fabricated houses to extreme poor populations living in informal slums in Latin America. They work with a NGO, Un Techo Para Mi País (UTPMP), which is a youth-led program that provides such houses to extreme poor populations living in the slums of 14 Latin American countries.
The main objective of the program is to improve household well-being and increase the beneficiary household's probability of exiting extreme poverty. UTPMP targets households in sub-standard housing typically made of materials such as cardboard, tin and plastic, with dirt floors and lacking services such as water and sewage. 
The project proposes to evaluate the impact of UTPMP housing on physical and mental health, socio-economic, and security outcomes and also examine if there are spillovers to non-beneficiaries living in treatment communities.

Two million children die of diarrheal disease each year and contaminated water is often to blame. Treating water with chlorine could substantially reduce this toll. The most common approach to chlorination in areas without piped water infrastructure is to offer small bottles of chlorine for sale to consumers. However, chlorine use has been slow to catch on in this system. 
In this Kenyan study area, for example, less than 10% of households regularly use chlorine at a monthly cost of approximately US$0.30, despite several years of vigorous social marketing that has raised awareness about the product.
Based on this finding, the team has developed a way to drastically cut the cost of chlorinating water by reducing packaging and distribution costs, which account for the majority of the price of chlorine sold in individually-packaged bottles by installing chlorine dispensers at communal water sources. Users turn a knob on the dispenser to release a pre-measured dose of chlorine appropriate to treat the volume of water typically collected. The presence of a dispenser provides a reminder to treat water and harness peer effects to help increase take-up.
Sustainability in this context requires that an affordable supply of chlorine is consistently available, and that dispensers are refilled on a regular basis (approximately monthly). Evidence on the health effects will help policy-makers determine if chlorine dispensers are a cost-effective investment.

GoBifo means “go forward” in Krio, the language spoken by 97% of Sierra Leone's population. GoBifo is a community driven development (CDD) pilot project in Sierra Leone that seeks to build social capital, trust and capacity for collective action in the communities where it works. 
The project’s designers sought to do this by establishing (or re-establishing) inclusive and representative Village Development Committees (VDCs) in communities and then training them in egalitarian development planning. VDCs were then given grants with which to carry out development projects they had chosen in the planning process.
The evaluation— led by the Evaluations Unit of Institutional Reform and Capacity Building Project (a project of the Government of Sierra Leone and the World Bank) with technical assistance from the Centre for Evaluation of Global Action — is designed to test the ability of a participatory CDD approach to build social capital and increase the inclusiveness of community decision making in a post conflict environment where a lack of participatory decision making in local politics was seen by many as a contributor to the long running conflict in the country. 
The objective is to inform the project development and seek funding to scale up community level CDD programs and integrate them into one of the large scale community development programs in Sierra Leone.
The evaluation will also seek to develop and refine new participatory tools to identify much sought after, yet hard to measure development outcomes such as trust and participatory decision making.

How do rural micro-enterprises function, and how can one identify savings and credit interventions to enable entrepreneurship and improve the living standards in sub-Saharan Africa?
The project aims to shed some light on these issues by conducting a randomized controlled trial involving 600 micro-entrepreneurs in Western Kenya who are provided with access to financial services.
The proposed study will generate rigorous evidence on the effectiveness of financial services for the very poor, a population which has been largely understudied to date, despite their importance. 
The study will provide evidence on which factors constrain entrepreneurship and, by extension, growth and development in poor countries. It will also generate a unique panel dataset that will be of use to any researcher or practitioner interested in African entrepreneurs.

Food and nutrition security are increasingly being recognized as fundamental to the prevention, care and treatment of HIV and AIDS. International organizations such as WHO, UNAIDS, WFP and FAO have recommended integration of food assistance into AIDS care and treatment programs.
This study - a collaboration between The AIDS Support Organization (TASO), The Regional Network on AIDS, Livelihoods and Food Security (RENEWAL) coordinated by IFPRI, and WFP - aims to evaluate the impact of household food ration on clinical, socioeconomic and behavioural outcomes elabourated in the above section.
Given the ethical considerations in randomizing food assistance to People Living With HIV/AIDS (PLWHIV) in the context of chronic malnutrition and food insecurity, this impact evaluation employs a quasi experimental design, nested within the current TASO program activities. WFP collaborates with TASO to provide food assistance to HIV positive clients in some of the TASO centres.
The project will employ propensity matching methods with difference- in -difference estimations to examine changes that occur as a result of food assistance to evaluate the impact of food supplementation on: a) HIV progression, medical, nutritional and quality of life, high risk behaviour, labour productivity and food security outcomes of PLWHIV, and b) socioeconomic, health, and nutritional outcomes at the household level including food security, household dietary diversity, household expenditures, intra-household labour reallocation, assets and savings, indebtedness, perceived well-being, mental health and child growth.

As progress is made towards universal primary school enrolment, and millions of children around the world complete primary schooling and hope to move on to a secondary school, an important question for policymakers is emerging. How quickly can access to secondary education be expanded?
In collaboration with the Government of Ghana, the project examines the medium and long-term impacts of secondary school for a cohort of students in Ghana who earned admission into a senior secondary school but could not afford to pay the fees. It identified 1,800 students who took the Bachelor of Early Childhood Education (BECE) in April 2008 and gained admission into a senior secondary school for September 2008, but who did not enrol because of financial distress. Out of these 1,800 students, 600 have been selected through random assignment to each receive a 4-year scholarship to attend the senior secondary school they were admitted to, starting January 2009.
The study tracks the 1,800 students from 2009 until 2018. Follow-up surveys with them, and the households that they reside in, are conducted every three years. The follow-up surveys will include questions on health, labour market outcomes, and fertility and marriage. This will enable to measure the medium and long-term effects of acquiring secondary education on multiple aspects of life and well-being.

Early years of life are pivotal in forming the foundations for healthy development and providing children and their societies the opportunity to reach their full potential. Programs to promote early childhood development (ECD) are most critical in Africa, where children face the myriad risks of disease, malnutrition, conflict and low-quality education systems. Governments in Africa urgently need evidence about the effectiveness of ECD programs to help them make informed decisions about the allocation of resources in their struggle to meet basic needs and secure a better future for their citizens.
In response to this imperative for actionable evidence, Save the Children and the World Bank are collaborating with local partners to carry out a ground-breaking evaluation of an early childhood development (ECD) program in Gaza Province, Mozambique. This ECD program enrols vulnerable children ages 3-5 – those living amidst high levels of poverty and/or affected by HIV/AIDS – and provides them with a high-quality but low-cost and fiscally scale-able model of pre-school education that helps build the foundation for lifelong learning. 

The NGO KickStart International initiated a market-driven initiative to manufacture and sell low cost treadle pumps and other productive assets designed and adapted for poor farmers in Africa. 
The main objective of the proposed impact evaluation project is to increase the capacity of KickStart to monitor and assess the impacts of its product on household income, education and the environment. A secondary objective is to identify the constraints that limit acquisition of pumps and other productive assets sold by KickStart.
This project will produce evidence to design and implement more effective and sustainable small-scale irrigation and asset development programs, and to develop state-of-art impact assessment system for market-led and private sector poverty reduction programs.

Non-profit and public organizations increasingly rely on the services of community members to deliver and promote health goods, yet research on the motivation and performance of these agents is scarce.
This project performs a rigorous evaluation of different incentive schemes to motivate community-based agents engaged in the distribution of female condoms in Zambia. Female condoms present a valuable technology for the prevention of HIV/AIDS and other Sexually Transmitted Infections and give women the ability to take protection into their own hands.  
While female condom uptake has been high in some parts of Southern Africa, barriers to adoption similar to those accompanying many new technologies continue to hinder usage in many communities.  Society for Family Health in Lusaka, Zambia is relying on a novel distribution channel – hairdressers and barbers – to promote the female condom and to provide information to customers about its proper use and the dangers of unprotected sex. 

Treatment for tuberculosis is long, complicated, and can cause uncomfortable side-effects. As a result, roughly 40% of patients worldwide do not complete the full course of treatment. Such non-compliance is in part responsible for the nearly two million annual TB deaths and the rapidly emerging problem of drug-resistant bacteria. 
In Karachi, Pakistan, the incidence of TB is believed to be particularly high, with 13,332 patients registered under the National TB Control Programme (NTP) in 2007.  Increasingly, the problem of non-compliance is leading to the emergence of multi-drug resistant TB (MDRTB), a form of TB that is more expensive and difficult to treat. 
Of 7,185 new pulmonary cases studied in Karachi in 2006, 12% were reported to have defaulted on treatment. The system currently recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) for tackling the problem of non-compliance is Directly Observed Therapy Short-Course (DOTS), which involves on-site, in-person monitoring of compliance with medication. DOTS programmes in Karachi use health workers, health clinic staff, or treatment supporters, who are usually family members, as monitors. However, there is no way of verifying whether and to what extent patients are complying with their drug regimen. 
In this study, Interactive Research and Development (IRD) plans to evaluate “X out TB,” a new monitoring system developed by Innovations in International Health.  Patients will be asked to urinate daily on test strips that detect whether or not they have taken their medication. These strips will be dispensed automatically each day by a dispenser provided to the patient to take home. If the test is positive (the patient did take his/her drugs), the strip will reveal a unique code that the patient can type into their cell phone and send as a text message to a central database. Positive compliance will be rewarded with a transfer of a small monetary credit on their cell-phone at the end of the week.
InterActive Research and Development (IRD) seeks to determine the program impacts of “X out TB” through administering a randomized control trial among newly diagnosed TB patients in Karachi, Pakistan.