Understanding how reconciliation affects communities can have profound policy implications and is particularly important in the context of war-torn Sierra Leone affected by a 13 year civil war. This study will assess a unique community-based transitional justice program called “Fambul Tok” (Family Talk in Krio), which implements local-level reconciliation ceremonies and promotes communal activities at the village level.

Fambul Tok represents a new form of transitional justice, as it operates at the community level, in comparaison with truth commissions and war crimes courts — such as Sierra Leone’s own Truth and Reconciliation Commission or Special Court — which operate at the national level.

To understand how reconciliation affects conflict, researchers will analyze how the program affects individuals’ attitudes toward violence, the incidence of disputes and crimes in the community, and the mechanisms used to resolve disputes by using a randomized field experiment. The reasearch team will then analyse whether reconciliation serves as a base for economic development, by analyzing how the program affects economic activity. The evaluation will also measure if communities and individuals that come together through reconciliation are more willing to work together or contribute resources for communal ends.

This will be the first quantitative assessment of reconciliation at the local level and the first rigorous analysis looking at potential links between reconciliation and economic outcomes, which should have critical implications not only for future transitional justice mechanisms, but also for post-conflict development programs.

Education is a fundamental human right and key to sustainable development. Yet the ability to learn and the quality of instruction often fall far short of the aspirations and needs of people. Programs to improve school children’s health - and thereby their ability to learn have the potential to accelerate progress in achieving the goal of universal education. There is, however, limited experimental evidence on how different programs work together as well as interact with one another to improve education.  There are also few social experiments on either the improvement of instruction or on the control of malaria.

The project plans to evaluate two government pilot programs in Kenya: the screening and treatment of malaria in schools and training workshops and support for teachers to promote explicit and systematic literacy instruction. The programs will be assessed for their cost-effectiveness and impact on health and educational achievement. It will also look at how the programs interact with each other and assess how being both healthy and receiving quality teaching can work together to improve educational outcomes. The prospective evaluation utilises a randomised design among 100 primary schools: 25 schools receive only the malaria program; 25 only the literacy instruction intervention; 25 both programs and 25 neither. Health surveys (for which funding is already in place) will evaluate program impact on malaria and anaemia, whilst a range of quantitative and qualitative assessments will evaluate impact on educational achievement. In addition, the causal pathways by which the interventions have their effect will be determined.  In the case of the malaria intervention, there will be an assessment of how malaria prevention leads to a reduction in anaemia, an improvement in concentration and a lowering of absenteeism. For the literacy intervention, there will be an assessment of teaching practices in the classroom  and the developmental trajectory of early literacy skills such as letter knowledge,  letter-sound relationships and word recognition.

The Government of Kenya is seeking clear policy and technical guidance on the optimal approach to malaria control in schools as well as evidence that systematic instruction is essential for progress in early grading, reading and overall educational achievement.. The current evaluation, the first of its kind in Africa, will address this policy information gap. In addition, the work has the potential to raise awareness of the need to improve both health and the quality of instruction for enhancing education in Kenya. The learning from this project can also be extended to other countries where malaria is common and literacy is poor.

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) can be an important component of social protection policy, “…there is considerable evidence that CCTs have improved the lives of poor people.” (World Bank, 2009). While the amount of evidence we have on the impact of CCT programs is impressive, there are also areas of critical policy importance where there remain significant gaps Almost all that we know about the impacts of these programs come from Latin America, where income levels are much higher and institutional capacity is vastly superior when compared with many poor countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Secondly, no other program has to date proposed to compare the effectiveness of conditional versus unconditional transfers.  Thirdly, there is a lack of evidence on final outcomes in terms of learning, labour market or HIV risk. Finally, long term evaluations of CCT programs are rare – mainly because the control groups in these evaluations are treated after a short period of time.

The project, “Schooling, Income, and HIV Risk” is a randomized prospective evaluation of a CCT program in Malawi that was designed specifically to address these shortcomings. Malawi is a very poor country – even by Sub-Saharan African standards – with high rates of HIV infection and school dropout rates, especially for girls. Given the differences in poverty and institutional capacity compared with Latin American countries, it is likely that the design of this program will have to be significantly different.

The study has a rich set of data collection instruments, designed to examine final outcomes rather than measures of utilization: a school survey designed to collect detailed student attendance and progress; specially designed math and reading comprehension tests to assess learning achievement; biomarker data collection to assess impacts on malaria, anaemia, HIV and STD risk; and anthropometric measurements for infants and children. To examine long-term impacts, the study will return to the field in 2012 – four years after baseline and two years after the completion of the program – and collect evidence on a rich set of outcomes, including labour market participation.

There is increasing interest around the world in payment schemes that reward individuals, communities, and projects for conserving ecosystem services. Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are instantly appealing as they offer economic incentives for environment and development gains. To date, tens of millions of dollars have been invested in PES projects located in diverse areas like South Africa, Costa Rica and New York City. Discussions are actively underway to implement an international payment scheme that could transfer tens of billions of dollars in payments from developed countries to developing countries for reducing deforestation –which is responsible for 20 percent of annual global carbon emissions. Despite this widespread interest and investment in PES, surprisingly few programs have been carefully evaluated. 

Uganda’s National Environment Management Authority and the International Institute for Environment and Development, together with local partners like the Business Development Facility and the East Africa Katoomba Group plan to implement a PES program that provides financial incentives to local communities for conserving biodiversity in important forests located on privately owned land in western Uganda. This forest is ecologically important to Uganda because it provides a corridor for an endangered chimpanzee population.  It has also acquired global importance for its role in storing and sequestering carbon and regulating the climate.

The project, which could well be the first rigorous impact evaluation of PES, is a prospective randomised evaluation. The program, which will also be supported by a GEF grant , will randomly select and invite approximately 400 local landowners to conserve forest areas on their land and undertake reforestation/afforestation in return for financial compensation for a period of at least three years. The evaluation will measure whether the PES scheme is a cost - effective tool to enhance biodiversity and human welfare. In particular, it will measure the causal effect of the PES scheme on (1) the nature and composition of biodiversity and (2) the socio-economic welfare of beneficiaries. Additionally, the evaluation will measure, where possible, program spillovers on neighbours of beneficiaries.

Over the past decade, conditional cash transfer programs aimed at reducing short- and long-term poverty (via transfers conditional on health service and school attendance) have benefitted millions of families in over 30 countries. Little is however, known about the medium- to long-term effects of these programs in terms of human capital and labour market outcomes, and even less about whether the behaviour change produced by the conditionalities is maintained after a CCT program closes.  

This evaluation seeks to determine the effects of the Nicaragua CCT program, Red de Protección Social (RPS), 10 years after the start of the program. For a rigorous evaluation of this program, treatment and control localities were randomly assigned to become eligible for the program benefits in 2000 and 2003, respectively. The monetary benefits were provided in each of the experimental groups for only 3 years.

This project will take advantage of this experimental design to shed light on a number of research questions. First,  it will examine whether being eligible for the intervention during early primary school years (compared with being eligible close to or past the age where the education conditionalities were binding) resulted in differences in academic achievement, cognitive ability, and labour market outcomes. Second, it will analyse differences in cognitive ability and educational achievements between children that were under age 2 when their households were eligible for the program, and children whose households were eligible only after their second year of life. Third, it will study possible program effects on age of first sexual relations, age of first pregnancy and on reproductive health as measured by use of contraception and frequency of PAP smears. Fourth, it will investigate whether beneficiary households maintain higher levels of investment in the human capital of children (in nutrition, vaccinations, health care, and education) even after the intervention ended.

The study design also pays special attention to reducing panel attrition through extensive tracking of migrants. The study, which is being conducted by a team of Nicaraguan and US based researchers, will be of significant interest to policy makers in government and international agencies as well as local NGOs,  given the global spread of CCT programs.

With the rapid expansion of weekday childcare centers, an increasing number of municipalities in Brazil are seeking more cost effective alternatives. This study examines the relative value of alternative options in  early child care and development.  It examines two programs currently being implemented by the Government of Rio de Janeiro, in its municipality of over six million inhabitants. The alternatives being studied include weekday childcare centers that provide full day child care from Monday to Friday, and Saturday childcare centers that provide both child care and two hours of parenting training. 

Each of these alternatives will be compared to the home or private care that families would use in the absence of public care.  The study will determine the impact of these two models of childcare provision by comparing children (and their parents) that have randomly been offered different options. This randomization takes place because with Rio’s current budget for childcare provision, it can only provide care to a small fraction of the target population of children in Rio.  In a set of pilot childcare centers, the excess demand for public child care has meant that the allocation of children to child care options will be done using a lottery.

This study will address the question of which model has led to the greatest increase in child cognitive and behavioral development and at what cost.  While the weekday childcare model provides more care time, it is likely that the Saturday program (with parent training) could yield comparable results at a significantly lower cost, if the parent training is effective.  Secondly, the study looks at the impacts on other elements of household behavior, such as female labour force participation, income and consumption of both parents and children, time and goods investments in children. It will also examine how these intermediate outcomes relate to child development.  Finally, the cost effectiveness of these models will be evaluated- an essential factor to be considered while expanding in Rio de Janeiro as well as across Braziland other parts of Latin America.

The functioning of  healthy ecosystems usually involves a range of environmental services like carbon sequestration, watershed protection and biodiversity conservation. While property owners do benefit from environmental services, the bulk of the benefits accrue to external parties. This difference in private and social benefits results in a classic market failure. This implies that unless there are  changes in the structure of economic incentives, land owners often  provide very little of these socially valuable services.

Payments for environmental services (PES) programs aim to correct this incentive problem by compensating land owners in exchange for land use practices that protect or enhance environmental services. PES programs have generated significant excitement among policymakers because of their potential to deliver cost-effective environmental protection while increasing income for rural communities, particularly the poor (FAO 2007, Pagiola et al. 2005, Landell-Mills and Porras 2002).

Mexico's National Payments for Environmental Services Program is one of the first large-scale PES programs in a developing country. The program offers five-year contracts to pay both individual and community landholders for conserving the forest, as a proxy for the production of environmental services. The program covers more than 2.27 million hectares of forested land to dateand provides a key learning opportunity for the global community. Although economic theory provides some lessons for the design of effective payments for environmental services programs (Jack, Kousky and Sims 2008), there is very little empirical work that guides them.

The proposed study will rigorously evaluate the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of Mexico's National Payments for Hydrological Services program and draw relevant lessons for the design of future PES programs. The study will answer some crucial questions: Has Mexico's program succeeded in reducing deforestation rates? Has it induced additional deforestation on nearby properties ("leakage")? What were the primary socioeconomic benefits and costs of the program and has the program changed environmental management practices or local institutional capacity? How did each of these impacts vary across socioeconomic and environmental dimensions and what does this impact heterogeneity suggest for the targeting of future PES programs?

The ultimate goal of the assessment of Mexico's innovative Payments for Environmental Service program is to enable the global community in more effectively designing other large-scale incentive-based conservation efforts including global agreements for REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) under a new international climate treaty.

Education campaigns for voters are increasingly seen as a key method to empower citizens in a democracy and demand more effective leadership as well as provision of public services. The proposed study will evaluate the effect of Pre-Election Voter Awareness Campaigns (PEVACs)  in Delhi and Rajasthan, India . It will choose a random sample that receives voter education campaigns and will evaluate the effect of key indicators of democracy, including: voter turnout, election of criminal candidates, constituent’s feedback as well as legislator’s responsiveness to constituent needs.
 
Each location will also present opportunities to study PEVACs in a unique context. In Rajasthan, gender quotas for elected positions have been widely adopted. This presents an important context  for studying gender issues in voter education campaigns. Thus, complementing gender quotas with pro-active information campaigns provides voters objective and verifiable information about the performance of elected male and female leaders. This may help to both change the stereotypes that voters have about female candidates and enhance electoral accountability. The main focus of the campaign will be on public service delivery and it will include publicly available data on the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Different versions of this information will be delivered, some will particularly emphasise  female voter awareness and/or female leaders’ performance. The campaign will cover 200 village councils across 3 districts of Eastern Rajasthan.

In Delhi, prior studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of PEVACs but these studies have limited their scope to measuring voting behaviour at the polls. This study will consider other aspects of constituents’ civic participation--such as political activism--and will also measure the effects of information campaigns on the behaviour and performance of legislators. The study will be structured in such a way as to allow researchers to differentiate the change in councillor performance due to constituent advocacy and the change due to fear of political retribution at the polls.

After a decade in which the micro-credit sector has taken off worldwide, a great deal of interest is now focusing on the prospect of mobilizing micro-savings by pulling the liquidity of the poor into the formal banking sector. A new wave of technological innovations from mobile banking to ATM cards could reduce the transactions costs for small accounts. As the banking sector is facing a period of scarce liquidity, mobilizing savings among the unbanked can be a very low-cost source of lending capital with no currency risk. 

The intervention to be assessed is pairing a mobile operator and a bank to offer regular savings accounts funded through the mobile agent network. By lowering real interest rates and improving arbitrage, such services could increase small savings for the poor and have positive repercussions to the economy as a whole.

Financial products such as M-Pesa in Kenya have been extremely popular among policy makers and the private sector as it focused on  money transfers rather than mobilising savings. This project presents enormous potential for being scaled up.

The study will evaluate the potential of new weather index-based insurance products in satisfying the insurance needs of smallholder farmers for hedging against uncertainty in rainfall. The evaluation will study the effects of weather indexed insurance products provided by HDFC ERGO to smallholder farmers in the states of Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, India. Both these states are prone to high rainfall risks.

Index-based insurance products have been regarded as having enormous potential to reach small farmers in developing countries as they reduce cost of loss verifications, eliminate moral hazard and adverse selection problems. In practice, traditional index-based products are characterized by low demand and take up rates exist.

This intervention consists of offering multiple simple weather securities to farmers, rather than one insurance policy. These securities are more simple, flexible and inclusive compared to traditional index-based products. They can thus encourage stronger demand for such products. An initial research pilot conducted by IFPRI in 2009 for 373 farmers in southern Ethiopia showed that the tickets were well-understood and could fit the heterogeneous needs of farmers. As research continues in Ethiopia (in partnership with IFPRI, Nyala Insurance and Oxford University), HDFC ERGO will test the applicability of this research in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh. 

This study will test the ability of these securities to provide for household needs during periods  of bad weather. It will also test the consumption and production benefits of offering these tickets to smallholder farmers. As farmers are able to fulfil their insurance demands, they will be able to maintain their income irrespective of the bad weather. They will also be able to engage in agricultural activities that are prone to risks in rainfall failure but remain profitable.

In addition, this study will also look at how much training should be provided when farmers are introduced to these securities. It will also assess how much investment should be made for increasing the network of weather stations that are used in providing these securities.

Schools in India are notorious for their poor quality and it is generally accepted that children’s learning depends not just on the quality of the education system, but also on the home environment and parents’ education, especially mothers’ (Duncan et al 1996). The more educated parents are, the more they are involved, have higher expectations, allocate more resources to education; and have more educational materials at home. In places like rural India, most mothers have few years of schooling, and a majority of mothers are illiterate. For their children, these channels are, therefore, considerably narrow. When a legacy of formal education is absent, are there any levers that can open these channels directly? Can an adult literacy program for mothers contribute to create such an environment for disadvantaged children?

The Indian NGO Pratham has created a women's literacy program, as well as workshops to teach mothers how to interact with their children to improve child-learning outcomes. This evaluation will assess if these levers for literacy and learning can be introduced in adulthood and if they are movable. The results will be particularly relevant to several states in India such as Bihar and several countries in Africa where adult female literacy is very low and are either in the process or planning stage of rolling out adult literacy campaigns for mothers.

Recent findings indicate that male circumcision significantly and substantially lowers the likelihood of a man contracting HIV by up to 60 per cent. This has led to many discussions about how circumcision might be a viable prevention strategy for reducing the spread of HIV. However, the roll-out and scaling up of services in Africa has been slow. There have been limited rigorous studies on what could be the most effective way of scaling-up male circumcisions in Africa.  

This study will measure the effects of subsidies and information/counselling on the increase in demand for male circumcisions among adult men and infants in Malawi. In partnership with Banja La Mtsogolo (BLM), a reproductive health NGO in Malawi, the evaluation will involve surveys among 3,000 adult men living within clinic catchment areas and 1,500 women attending antenatal and neonatal clinics. At the end of the survey, respondents will receive vouchers of varying prices for a male circumcision at BLM clinics. This will allow for measuring the elasticity of demand for circumcision among both adult men and women (for their infant sons).

In addition to the voucher randomization, the evaluation will randomly allocate information about HIV and circumcision among respondents to measure the relative effect of information on the willingness to pay. The project will also evaluate the effectiveness of other counselling methods on the utilisation of circumcision services. Results from the evaluation will guide policy makers and health providers about cost-effective ways of increasing male circumcisions, and consequently reducing HIV infections.

Raising agricultural productivity is the principal challenge facing African agriculture, including in Tanzania. Agriculture in Tanzania accounts to 27 percent of GDP, 80 percent of employment, 75 percent of household income and is a key component for the country strategy for poverty reduction. One area that has received a lot of attention is that of input subsidies to promote the use of modern agricultural inputs in an effort to raise crop yields that remain well below the potential of readily available technology.

This is the first prospective impact evaluation of input subsidies as a mechanism to enhance productivity and improve food security on a large scale. The evaluation will provide a critical and timely opportunity to assess the cost effectiveness of the National Agriculture Input Voucher Scheme and its effects on incomes, agricultural production, food consumption, and food security. It will also determine the effect of the program on women farmers, and  harmful gender norms, weak property and contractual rights, and lack of initial investments for inputs.

In the three years of the program, input vouchers will be distributed in phases. Each eligible farm household will receive the subsidy for three years. Villages in the high potential maize and rice regions in both the North and South of the country will be matched whereby one village receives the voucher and one does not. This comparison will provide an estimate of the impact of the voucher scheme that avoids bias from spillovers or contamination.

Microfinance institutions have had great success at reaching poor and low-income households, but were less successful in reaching the very poor. Recent studies from Peru, Khazakstan, and Uganda reviewed by the IRIS Centre at the University of Maryland showed that only 15 percent or less of microfinance customers earn under 1 USD per day, which means that the poorest of the poor are largely left out of microfinance interventions. The NGO BRAC designed a specific program to provide microfinance services to extremely poor communities. The program is currently piloted in India, Pakistan and Honduras, and is being initiated in West Africa.

This intervention is modelled as a method of enabling the ultra-poor to use micro-entrepreneurship to build businesses and improve their lives. It first identifies the ultra-poor within a community, and intensively works with these families to improve business-oriented skills. The families are then provided with productive asset such as cows or goats to help them start their enterprise. Overall the program aims to boost the incomes of the ultra poor and improve school attendance of children, food security, health, and increased assets among the ultra-poor.

The evaluation of the program in West Africa will be key to assess the impact and cost effectiveness of such model as over half of the population lives below the poverty line and the region is dependent on emergency relief, food aid and international funds. By using a randomized controlled design and qualitative methods, the study will analyse the comparative impacts of different components of the program and separate the effects of the asset transfer from the savings requirement.

Inequality in access to higher education has become a pressing issue in Chile and many other countries in Latin America. Many countries use a formal test at the end of secondary education as a way to screen students for admission into the best universities. This system has the advantage of being transparent and less susceptible to manipulation by students with more influences or money. However,  in many countries higher education is de facto heavily subsidized for the rich, who are able to pay private schools or tutoring to prepare for entrance examinations and therefore access high quality publicly funded universities.

In Chile, all students who plan to continue onto university studies must take a standardized test called the “Prueba de Selección Universitaria (PSU)” (University Selection Test). The score obtained by students in this test determines the universities they can enter and careers they can follow. Slots in top universities are assigned following a strict ranking accordingly to their exam scores and secondary school grades. Many students spend several hours a week in after-school institutions (Preuniversitarios) to prepare for this final test when they can afford the tuition fees. 

For the first time, this research will provide experimental evidence on how test-preparation for higher education entrance exams affects poor children’s access to higher education. The evaluation will identify the existing barriers to higher education and inform the program design to overcome these barriers.  In a first stage, the research team will randomly distribute scholarships to a pool of qualifying students in their final year of high school who express interest in attending a pre-universitario. The effect of these scholarships on this pool of applicants will be determined by comparing the test scores and the entrance into university of those who received the scholarship compared to those who would not have received the scholarship. 

In a second stage, the evaluation will establish why poorer households are unable to save up for this investment in their child’s education. It will also explore behavioural and structural reasons for the lack of savings from poorer families and determine effective ways to encourage savings for parents to further invest in their children education.

Access to credit to spur entrepreneurship can provide a way out of poverty (Karlan and Valdivia, 2009). However, there is little evidence about the kind of skills and human capital required to manage a small business or become a successful employed individual.

The study will evaluate the effect of a training program for self-employed individuals and micro-entrepreneurs in Chile. The program is targeted to very poor households, and provides a training period close to 6 months and funding for the initial capital of up to US$600.

The study will evaluate the effect of the training on household income, employment, as well as child labour and school attendance. Using a randomized control trial, the research team will compare the different components of the program, focusing on increasing the time for training and increasing the amount of startup capital. It will also introduce several modifications of the program to better understand the existing mechanisms and how the different components of the program affect the different outcomes.

Community Driven Development/ Reconstruction programs are a major tool for supporting local level development as well as addressing needs in post-conflict environments. By 2004, such projects accounted for $ 7 billion in the World Bank’s portfolio alone (Mansuri and Rao 2004). The evidence for this approach, however, remains weak.

This evaluation involves a major study of the political and economic impacts of development aid in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC intervention has a population coverage of approximately 1.8 million people spread over a vast territory. The project aims to improve welfare in this conflict-affected region in a way that improves local governance structures and improves the position of women in their communities. The evaluation will find out whether the intervention has been successful in achieving these goals. The main evaluation strategy is to employ public lotteries to generate treatment and control group. Estimates of program effects are then generated by comparing outcomes in treated and control areas.

A key question of interest is the extent to which engagement in community based processes of this form builds local governance capacity to the point where the burden of management of development activities can be shifted from development agencies to community structures. In addition to the core impact evaluation a randomized approach is used to examine the impacts of gender quotas for decision making: in half the project areas local development committees are elected under a gender parity rule; this requirement is however absent in the other half. This variation in treatment will help to identify whether these kinds of design features introduced into development projects are effective in terms of empowering women.

Social networks in rural villages are vital channels of communication, yet different types of information may spread across networks by different paths and to different effect. A training of trainers approach may increase local capacity and ownership of such programs. However, actual behaviour change achieved in the targeted audience may vary according to the quantity and quality of links between trainers and trainees and the selection of individuals entrusted to communicate those messages. The standard Essential Nutrition Action (ENA) approach, for instance, has been to target not only mothers of infants for training, but also grandmothers with the belief that the experience of older women may influence younger women to accept the recommended practices. In Burkina Faso, another approach used by NGOs has been to target mothers and village health committee members who are selected by the community as influential people to provide guidance for children’s health.

The proposed study in Burkina Faso seeks to test whether using social network analysis to identify influential community members to diffuse messages achieves greater uptake of recommended nutrition practices than the conventional approach of using community elders, who are assumed to be influential. The study will include a social network “census” or questionnaire to collect information on the social contacts of mothers targeted for a combined homestead food production and nutrition education intervention (the age, education, ethnicity and socioeconomic status of their social contacts, for example). The social network data will be analyzed to understand not only how people are linked in the community, but also the characteristics of links that are most useful for transferring health information intended to encourage behaviour change. For example, health information may diffuse more effectively from individuals who have many social contacts than from those who have few contacts. It could also be that messages are diffused more effectively through those with closer kinship ties.

This evaluation plan will compare the uptake of ENA practices by mothers using grandmothers versus the health committee approach. Information from this analysis will be used to design the training strategy to be implemented in 15 randomly allocated villages with mothers of children 3-9 months at baseline and members of the village health committee; 15 other villages will be randomly allocated to the ENA traditional targeting approach which targets mothers and grandmothers; 20 villages will be randomly assigned to the control (no intervention) group.

In Uganda, HarvestPlus – a joint project from the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture and the International Food Policy Research Institute - introduced a beta-carotene-biofortified crop, the orange-fleshed sweet potato, as a strategy to reduce vitamin A deficiency in 2007. Vitamin A deficiency impairs the immune system and eyesight, resulting in increased mortality and blindness. Between 250,000 and 500,000 preschool children go blind annually as a result of vitamin A deficiency and globally US$450 million are spent annually on vitamin A supplementation. 

HarvestPlus is introducing biofortified staple food crops as a cost-effective, sustainable alternative to reduce micronutrient deficiencies. As a health intervention operating through introduction of a crop technology, the ultimate sustainability and cost-effectiveness of the intervention is best determined several seasons after the initial introduction of the crop.

The study will assess the sustainability of the interventions’ benefits, and the efficacy of the information and trainings provided, as well as the direct benefits measured by longer-term adoption and diffusion of the crop technology, and the health outcomes.

The WHO estimates that 1500 women worldwide die daily to pregnancy related complications. In a concerted attempt to improve maternal and child health outcomes, several Indian states have developed new programs that encourage pregnant women to deliver their babies in medical facilities rather than at home.  Specifically, pregnant women can use Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards as vouchers to receive free maternity care at designated maternity hospitals.  Contracted providers, usually an obstetrician or a small maternity facility, receives flat payments for each BPL delivery.
 
Despite absence of rigorous evidence on the effectiveness of these programs, many other Indian states (including Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Uttaranchal, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal) are implementing or planning their own versions of the CY program.  To guide these decisions in other states – and to provide timely feedback to Gujarat and Karnataka, this project will conduct rigorous regression discontinuity and experimental impact evaluations of these programs in both states. This evidence will also be central in guiding other Indian states’ efforts to improve birth-related outcomes.

Despite recent increases in institutional deliveries, birth outcomes in India have been slow to improve.  One likely explanation is the low quality of medical care, which is unfortunately common in many parts of India.  Low quality medical care in India cannot simply be attributed to insufficient medical knowledge among providers.  Instead there is evidence that, even among knowledgeable clinicians, provider effort is very low – suggesting poor alignment between clinician incentives and patient health .

To address the low quality of medical care directly, the project will also conduct policy experiments in Karnataka to evaluate the effectiveness of financial incentives to maternity care providers for (a) improvements in the clinical quality of services and (b) actual gains in maternal health (measured as reductions in postpartum haemorrhage rates – the leading cause of maternal mortality). It will evaluate the effectiveness of these provider incentives both with and without vouchers for institutional delivery.

Uninsured risk leaves poor households vulnerable to losses from negative shocks such as weather disasters. Developing programs to shield farmers from production risk has, therefore, acquired importance in China, considering the frequency of natural disasters and the fact that 65 percent of the population are dependant on agriculture. As a consequence, rural insurance markets have started to grow. Insurance companies are increasing their investments in the agricultural sector.  The government has also been offering huge subsidies as an incentive for farmers to buy insurance. The Government of China now urgently needs evidence about the effectiveness of the current agricultural insurance products offered in pilot areas. This can help the government decide whether such products should be extended to the whole country, as well as consider the improvements that can be made to current contracts.

For this, the research team will work with local partners to implement an evaluation of the major agricultural insurance product, the rice production insurance, in Jiangxi Province of Southern China – a region where 80 percent of the farmers produce rice as their main agricultural activity. Rigorous evaluations of the effects of agricultural insurance are quite limited. Conducting such an evaluation is challenging because farmers are self-selected into the insurance program. Hence, there is a serious identification problem. This project will be the first comprehensive impact evaluation of agricultural insurance in China using a randomized control trial. It will determine the effect of insurance provision on the welfare, consumption, production and financial decisions of rural households.