The state government of Andhra Pradesh, India is in the process of implementing an extremely ambitious program meant to improve rural livelihoods. The program “Indira Kranthi Pratham” reaches out to women self help groups in 33,000 villages across the state and is arguably the world’s largest collection of women’s self help groups. The program aims to ensure “Total Financial Inclusion” which is to ensure that every self-help group has access to formal sector credit and banking services.
This impact evaluation study looks specifically at the program’s provision of ‘debt swapping’. With debt swapping, women in the self help groups can take a very low interest loan from a bank in order to retire their higher interest informal debt. In contrast to the micro loans which are the bread and butter of these groups, these ‘debt-swapping’ loans can be very large (up to about $ 10,000), and the government pays almost all the interest on these loans.
Debt swapping could be very useful to houselholds that have debt burdens that greatly exceed their annual income. These households may owe money to local informal money lenders, to their landlord and to other micro-lending organizations that compete with moneylenders but which charge the same usurious rates of interest.
 This study measures the effects of these loans and poses some sharp questions. How does ‘debt’ swapping’ affect the financial portfolios of participating households? Is this different from a comparable increase in wealth? Does ‘debt swapping’ help the woman’s family eat better and go hungry less often?;
The study thus aims to see the effect of debt swapping on the overall debt, to see whether the woman goes back to the money lenders after retiring her debt with them, and to see if other measures of the well-being of the woman and her family improve.

As forests continue to decline globally, decentralization reforms aim to improve rural livelihoods and conserve forests by transferring management powers to local communities and governments. Decentralization theory suggests local decision makers will make more informed and efficient management decisions than central governments, due to their site-specific forest knowledge and the lower cost to engage in management activities.
Tanzania's Participatory Forest Management (PFM) program follows such a decentralized strategy. It has three major objectives - improved local livelihoods, resource governance and forest conditions. The program encompasses two approaches. The first is Joint Forest Management (JFM) where the country’s Forest and Beekeeping Division and a community institution jointly manage a Government Forest Reserve and formally share revenues. The second is a Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM), where a community institution gains collective ownership and sole management authority over a village forest. Key differences between JFM and CBFM concern the extent of participation by villagers, provisions for revenue generation and sharing, distribution of tenure rights over forests, and allowable harvesting activities.
Twelve years after the introduction of this program, there is still little empirical understanding of its impacts. This study will remedy the gap by evaluating the program’s impacts on livelihoods, governance and forest conditions.

The effectiveness of extension services in increasing the adoption of improved agricultural technology and improving productivity is not formally documented.  Extensionists are generally in charge of several communities spread over large areas and can often not respond to the needs of the entire population they are in charge of. Governments and organizations on the ground have therefore been attempting to decentralize extension services.
In the Zambezi valley in Mozambique, contact farmers are chosen within a community with the aim of facilitating the flow of information from the extensionists to the farmers. However, there is no evidence of their effectiveness in disseminating new technologies. From the policymakers’ point of view, there is no rigorous evidence on what activities and incentive mechanisms are most valuable in making extension services work for farmers.
Demonstration plots have also often been used as part of the dissemination strategy for new agricultural techniques and technologies. Here again, there is no clarity on how effective demonstration plots are in increasing farmers' access to extension services, both in terms of quantity and quality of the technical assistance. There is also little evidence of their efficacy in boosting farmers' adoption of new cultivation practices.
This study will measure the impact of assigning the implementation of a clear activity-a demonstration plot- to a decentralized network of extensionists and contact farmers and the effect on the adoption of new agricultural techniques. In addition, the role of women in disseminating the new technology to other women will be studied by comparing communities where only the contact farmer holds a demonstration plot to communities where a woman is also directly in charge of a demonstration plot. Finally, this study will compare two types of performance-based incentives for contact farmers and their impact on boosting the adoption of a new technology within their communities.

The demand for early child development (ECD) programs has expanded massively, with total enrolment in pre-primary education more than doubling in the last thirty years and the proportion of children in pre-primary education in Latin America more than tripling over the same time period. With this massive surge, resource-poor nations need options that provide quality investments while controlling costs.
The Government of Mexico is investing in a low-cost ECD program where trained members of poor communities provide out-of-school training for parents and caregivers of children between 0 and 4 years. The training is provided to improve the parent’s competencies and practices in caring for children, and to contribute to the children's comprehensive development and school readiness. For the training, it uses existing community spaces for four hours a week which significantly reduces the cost of constructing specific care centers.
The program currently reaches approximately 450,000 children and their parents. It involves delivering a curriculum that provides stimulation to the children and training to the parents, with newly developed modules specifically geared towards fathers.  Fathers are currently underrepresented in parenting education and the sessions are therefore tailored to address the ultimate goal of increasing their involvement in child rearing.
While a variety of early child development programs are being evaluated throughout Latin America and the world, this project examines the effectiveness of this low-cost parental training specifically designed to reach fathers. Broadly, the study will examine the impacts of this program on children’s communication, problem-solving, motor skills as well as social and emotional development. It will also assess the impact on parenting knowledge and behaviors.

Identifying or ‘targeting’ the poor to determine eligibility for a government's anti-poverty program is challenging because the government often lacks verifiable records of people's income and assets. Targeted social programs can have mis-targeting rates of over 40 per cent which means that many social programs designed to help the poor never even reach them.
To address this issue, the government of Indonesia has been working on a nationwide, unified targeting system. The government is considering three main methods for the targeting system which will be used across all targeted social programs in Indonesia. The three methods are (i) proxy means testing; (ii) self targeting methodologies; (iii)community inclusion methods, where the community is involved in determining  who is poor.
This study will test the efficacy and cost effectiveness of these methods in identifying the poor for its conditional cash program, Program Keluarga Harapan (PKH). A randomized experiment will be conducted across the 600 villages where the PKH program is being implemented to determine which type of methodology "works" best in identifying those who are eligible for the program. The study will also test whether the efficacy of the targeting methodology varies by the underlying characteristics of the area like poverty rate and poverty density.
The results of this study can help Indonesia frame its nation-wide targeting strategy and inform targeting practices across social programs around the world.

Bihar is one of India's poorest states, where the level of women's literacy and girls' school enrolment remain very low. Most poor households in Bihar are chronically indebted to local moneylenders who charge interest rates of up to 120% per annum. Often, land and other productive assets are turned over as collateral for the duration of the loan, inhibiting the borrower's ability to repay. The cycle of debt and poverty can trap families for generations.
This study uses a randomized control trial to quantify the impact of the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project or Jeevika on poverty and women's empowerment. The project is expected to reach 600,000 households across Bihar by 2013.
Jeevika provides affordable credit and agricultural training to women in rural Bihar through self-help groups (SHGs). Once an SHG has demonstrated the commitment of its members to contribute regular savings, and the capacity to keep records of these finances, it becomes eligible for access to an initial capitalization fund of 50,000 Rs ($1,100 US) for lending among its members. Additional interventions such as training in intensive farming and animal husbandry are also planned for targeted populations.
A primary objective of this project is to allow households to retire high-cost debt. This is expected to improve food security, allow accumulation of productive assets, and ultimately increase household income. In addition, the project aims to increase women's empowerment and capacity for collective action. This evaluation will measure all of these impacts using a quantitative and qualitative approach. Data generated through this evaluation can inform the national scale-up of similar Indian livelihoods projects throughout India, which are scheduled to begin in 2011.

The risk of a drought or flood is the single most important risk faced by hundreds of millions of poor households around the world. In response, many governments have developed crop insurance programs. Such programs, which often link compensation to farm yield, suffer from a range of potential problems. Transaction costs may be high, because claims verification is necessary. As with any indemnity-based product, they suffer from moral hazard which means that those with insurance may have less incentive to engage in costly efforts to save a failing crop. They also suffer from the problem of adverse selection which implies that policies are particularly attractive to individuals whose expected yields are low, and often unattractive to farmers who have high expected yields.
In 2006, SEWA, an NGO based in Gujarat, India, began offering weather insurance in 50 villages, chosen at random from a set of 100. Weather insurance is a financial instrument, offered by private and government insurers, which pays a benefit in case of adverse weather conditions. In comparison to commercially unviable crop insurance, it is financially sustainable, has minimal transaction costs, and avoids problems of adverse selection and moral hazard.
While SEWA struggled initially with low adoption, in 2010 it sold 6,384 policies to 1,844 farmers. Approximately 50% of households that received marketing eventually purchased the policy, and the average level of coverage was over Rs. 5,000 (USD 120), an amount equivalent to a significant fraction of household income.
This study is a long-run randomized evaluation of the effect of introducing this rainfall insurance scheme. It will trace the impact of insurance on household consumption and investment decisions. It will evaluate the effects of how insurance interacts with SEWA's agricultural outreach and extension programs, including demand for credit, fertilizer usage, and cropping decisions. Regular household surveys will help measure how insurance payouts affect caloric consumption, child education, and temporary migration.

As compared to other age-groups, poverty alleviation amongst the elderly requires a different approach. Non-contributory social pension programs are one of the few workable options. According to the Madrid International Action Plan on aging (UN, 2002), “non-contributory pension can help to fulfill the commitment of reducing in half the number of poor elderly by 2015, as well as contributing to their empowerment”. Currently 72 countries are implementing social pension programs, 46 being low- and middle-income economies. Despite the efforts towards boosting social protection for elderly, there have been no rigorous impact evaluations of such programs. This study seeks to rigorously evaluate the non-contributory pension scheme, Programa 70 y mais in Mexico to help address the knowledge gap. The program has two components; the first involves giving unconditional cash transfers of 500 Mexican pesos on a monthly basis to people 70 years and over residing in a locality with 2,500 or less inhabitants. The second component involves health oriented social participation and action. Researchers in this study will analyze how the first program component affects the mental health and nutritional status of the beneficiaries. The evaluation design is a regression discontinuity approach, with a difference-in-difference model, where pre and post-program data would be collected by surveys with a panel of about 5,200 elderly. The design also includes a qualitative component, to study the social and household-level mechanisms by which the program has an impact. Results would also be segregated by gender, indigenous origin and socio-economic status.

While interventions aimed at improving health and human capital are common in developing countries, very few have an evaluation component built into their design. Even when evaluation is built-in, long-term follow-ups rarely take place, so that existing evaluations reveal only short or medium term results. This evaluation however studies long-term and intergenerational impacts of the Maternal, Child Health and Family Planning (MCH-FPP) program in Matlab, a rural area of Bangladesh. The evaluation will measure these impacts 35 years after the program started.
The main program interventions were provision of modern contraception and tetanus-toxoid vaccinations for pregnant women, vaccinations against measles, DPT, polio and tetanus and Vitamin A supplementation for children. The study will evaluate the impact of these interventions on long-term health and welfare outcomes (e.g. labor market, marriage, migration, educational attainment and nutrition) and intergenerational transmission of poverty or program sustainability by studying the health and educational outcomes of grandchildren.
In order to ensure a rigorous evaluation, treatment and comparison areas were selected as part of the program design, based on their similarity and hence comparability. The comparison group began receiving the intervention 11 years after the treatment group, providing a long- term evaluation panel. To reduce panel attrition, migrants were extensively tracked and regular demographic surveillance was conducted.

Inter-seasonal fluctuation of agricultural prices is widespread throughout the developing world. Prices decrease at harvest season owing to the availability of large quantities of crop while the prices increase in the lean season.  However, small farmers are often unable to benefit from the price increase owing to credit constraints for meeting their immediate cash needs and storage facilities. They are thus forced to sell at low prices and are unable to make a profit. Community inventory credit aims to help small farmers to cope with seasonal volatilities by providing liquidity for short-term needs.
The Sierra Leone National Program Coordinating Unit (NPCU) at the Ministry of Agriculture plans to implement a palm oil inventory credit scheme in collaboration with several Rural and Agricultural Banks (RABs) in 40 communities with potential for scale-up in the following year. RABs will help farmers identify community storage facilities and offer individual loans worth 75% of their products harvest-time value.
This study seeks to rigorously evaluate this intervention to examine the relation between access to credit and access to markets for small farmers. The questions it seeks to answer are: a) Do farmers’ take-up the credit product? b) Does inventory credit help address their immediate liquidity needs? c) To what degree do farmers modify their sales patterns when using the credit product? d) What are the impacts on profit, investment, consumption and food security? e) Does inventory credit reduce inter-seasonal price volatility and improve market efficiency.
The product will be randomly allocated to 120 communities over 2 districts. The communities will be divided into 3 groups; the first treatment group will be offered the complete product; the second treatment group will be given palm oil containers and storage spaces, but not credit for storage; the third group will be the control group.

Most family planning programs are targeted at educating females and providing them with access to contraceptives. However fertility decisions of females are often influenced by their husbands, whose support is integral. Previous research shows that male involvement in family planning actually decreases female access to such services. 
Based on survey responses indicating that family planning was being used for child spacing rather than controlling for the number of children, researchers in this study hypothesize that male preferences may be altered by educating them on the adverse health impacts of bearing multiple children in close succession, without sufficient time for maternal recovery. To test this hypothesis, this study seeks to evaluate the impact of an intervention targeted at married men in Lusaka, Zambia. The program will provide information about contraceptives and the benefits of child spacing through group meetings and one-to-one educational sessions.
The main evaluation questions to be addressed are: a) Can male preferences be altered through an educational intervention? b) Which educational content is more effective in altering preferences; information on maternal health or information about contraceptives? c) Which educational setting is more effective; individual or group and which individuals gain most from group education? d) Can education neutralise the negative impact of male involvement on contraceptive access and under what conditions? The evaluation design is a randomized control trial with 3 treatment and one control arm.

Many studies have found that information about new agricultural technologies flows through social networks, however little is known about the way in which these networks accomplish this. Understanding such mechanisms has policy relevance for governments to be able to effectively use social relationships to disseminate new technologies. This study proposes to examine such mechanisms.
The intervention to be evaluated seeks to promote two agricultural technologies in Malawi: pit planting and improved crop residue management. In arid regions, planting maize in a shallow pit in the ground is effective in retaining plant moisture while minimizing soil disturbance. Once the crop is harvested, crop residues can be used as compost manure and mulch. However these technologies are not popular in Malawi. This program will use network theories of how people learn and interact within social networks to select the most promising extension partners for technology promotion.
The program evaluation will then study the effectiveness of different types of extension partners in endorsing the new technologies. Specifically, four questions will be answered: a) Can partnership with well connected farmers as extension partners increase take up? b) Is clustering of extension partners useful, or should they be geographically and socio-economically spread out? c) What benefits are accrued by using a scalable, cost-effective proxy measure of a farmer’s position in a social network? d) Does cost and complexity of the new agro-techniques influence which individuals will be the most effective extension partners?A randomised controlled trial will be administered with 3 treatment villages and 1 control village.

More than 9 million people around the world suffer from tuberculosis (TB) each year. India has the highest incidence rate in the world. While TB is curable, the challenge is being able to detect it early and ensuring that patients comply with the 6 month treatment. The DOTS (Directly Observed Treatment Short Course) system introduced by WHO, has been designed to increase accessibility of treatment and monitoring of patients through community-based DOT centers and health workers.
However, as experienced by Operation ASHA, an NGO in Delhi that runs DOTS centers, monitoring community health workers (counselors) is a difficult task. Particularly in remote areas, many studies have found problems with attendance and motivation of public health staff. The NGO has consequently designed a financial incentive scheme, where counselors are initially rewarded for detecting new patients, and after the number of detections reaches a saturation point, they get penalized for drop-outs. The incentives of course come in addition to a base salary.
This study is a randomised controlled trial of the incentive scheme in slums of 15 cities in 3 states of India. The study will evaluate the causal links between incentives, counselor’s commitment, performance and satisfaction with their job, patients well being and the over-all cost-effectiveness of Operation ASHA’s centers.

China is the largest user of fertilizers in the world. However, the current utilization rate of nitrogen fertilizers is leading to serious environmental problems such as nitrogen leaching in the ground and lake water and greenhouse effects. ‘Improved nitrogen management is therefore important for both climate change and agricultural sustainability’ (IPCC, 2007).
In China, the problem is compounded by the lack of knowledge amongst farmers about the negative effects of excessive fertilizer use. Moreover the public agricultural extension system has been ineffective at delivering fertilizer training and know-how to farmers. The Chinese government has now begun to address this problem, through Farmer Field Schools (FFS).
This study proposes to evaluate the effectiveness of FFS training in reducing fertilizer use by Chinese greenhouse vegetable and rice farmers. FFS training involves week-long, half-day group sessions of farmer-led hands-on learning, on experimental plots. Non-formal trainings are also conducted before a single crop-growing season. The goal is to provide FFS graduates with crop-management skills, learning capabilities and communication skills. One farmer-trainer (FT) is also selected to disseminate low carbon farming practices to other farmers.
A randomised control trial will be implemented in 48 villages in Beijing and Hunan provinces. The outcome indicators to be measured are; the effects of FFS on reducing fertilizer use and increasing environmental awareness, the impact on farmer incomes, impact on knowledge and adoption of environmentally friendly farming practices, impact on farmer perception of  FFS and impact on grain vs. cash crop farmers.

Out of the 2 billion people suffering from anemia worldwide, about half of these cases are traceable to Iron Deficiency Anemia (IDA) (WHO, 2007). In India 24% of men and 56% of women are anemic (National Family Health Survey, 2005-06). IDA has been associated with low productivity in adults and cognitive and physical stunting among children.
In resource-poor settings, the most viable intervention to address IDA is iron supplementation of foods. Foods that can be fortified with iron include flour, milk products, fish sauce and salt. In rural Bihar however, since most households consume their own grain or buy whole grain from the public distribution system (PDS), the best option is to supply double fortified salt (DFS). While there exist small-scale randomised clinical trials on the potential of DFS in reducing anemia, there have been no evaluations of policy interventions to introduce DFS in at-risk communities.
In collaboration with the government of Bihar, researchers conducting this evaluation are attempting to address this knowledge gap. They propose to design a pilot program introducing DFS in PDS shops and the regular village neighborhood (kirana) stores.
The evaluation will take place in two phases; in the first phase various types of information campaigns encouraging take-up of DFS will be tested. The willingness of people to pay at different prices will also be assessed via a randomised pricing experiment. In the second, a large-scale randomised trial will be conducted to study the impact of DFS on salt consumption, anemia, weakness, diseases, wages, work hours and school attendance. Results on take-up and costs would be obtained for distributions via PDS shops and via kirana stores.

Social cash transfers are rapidly gaining popularity in developing countries as a way to mitigate and break the intergenerational cycle of poverty.  Several African governments are now experimenting with targeted social cash transfers to vulnerable groups. They are searching for alternative strategies to attain the health related Millennium Development Goal (MDG) through various demand side interventions focusing on the health sector like community based health insurance, public health insurance and differentiated or elimination of user fees for specific target groups.
The Government of Ghana recently initiated the Livelihood Empowerment against Poverty Program (LEAP), a social cash transfer that is the flagship programme in the nation's Social Protection Strategy. It targets ultra-poor households with orphans and vulnerable children, elderly and disabled, and provides cash every month determined by the household size. LEAP had reached 35,000 households until early 2010.
Aside from direct cash payments, beneficiaries are provided free health insurance through the National Health Insurance Scheme. Benefiting households automatically qualify for subsidized enrollment into the health insurance scheme and participation in the scheme is a condition for remaining in the intervention.
The evaluation will assess and compare the effect of the intervention on three groups: the households receiving both health insurance and a cash transfer; those receiving only health insurance; and those receiving neither.

The past ten years have witnessed a heightened focus on providing financial services to the poor. This has been prompted by the belief that financial services allow the poor to develop income-generating activities and improve their ability to cope with shocks.
This study uses randomized controlled trials to evaluate the financial service delivery model of using bank branches in villages to provide a full range of credit, savings, insurance services and tailored financial advice to effectively reach individuals in financially marginalized communities.
This model is an alternative to the standard microfinance movement in India, which has focused primarily on microcredit. The intervention is being implemented by Pudhuaaru Financial Services Private Limited in Thanjavur and Thirivuvar districts in Tamil Nadu. Over the course of four years, Pudhuaaru Financial Services will expand in 160 branch locations selected for the intervention, covering a rural population of 1.6 million.
The evaluation will assess the impact of increased financial access in villages where a first bank branch has been opened. This will be done using data from baseline and endline surveys.
The randomized rollout of rural banks will be used to identify the causal impact of financial services on economic growth and rural household wellbeing. Previous evaluations of microcredit have not found large effects on poverty alleviation. In contrast, non-experimental evaluations of rural bank branches in India report significant poverty reduction. This intervention provides a unique opportunity to undertake a rigorous experimental evaluation of the impacts of bank branch expansion in rural areas at both the household and village level.

Malnutrition and nutrient deficiencies are widespread among Indian children, stunting child development and limiting learning. In response to these problems, the Supreme Court of India mandated the provision of nutritious midday meals to every primary school student. In most districts, the programme is implemented through local contractors. Unfortunately, the availability and quality of these meals varies greatly due to limited resources, inadequate infrastructure, widespread inefficiency and corruption.
This study will evaluate the relative efficiency of three strategies developed by Naandi to provide iron fortification to schoolchildren through India's midday meal programme. In the first strategy, iron-fortified meals are delivered from a mechanized central kitchen. This model was designed to minimize costs, ensure the provision of a uniform meal, and minimize opportunities for corruption by contractors, school administrators and teachers. In the second strategy, the current providers will be given information on micronutrient fortification and offered a price lower than unfortified lentils. In the third strategy, training will be provided to parents and fortified lentils will be given to children who attend a predetermined number of schools days each month.
Comparing these strategies to the current provision of unfortified meals will help measure the efficacy of these different methods and their impact on nutritional status and educational outcomes. The study will use a randomized-control-trial methodology to ensure causal effects are identified.

Violence against women is increasingly recognized as an important social, development, health and human rights problem. In Uganda, 59 per cent of women aged 15-49 who have ever been married, have been physically or sexually abused by their partners. Recent analysis also suggests that women who have experienced violence face twice the odds of HIV infection compared to women who have not experienced violence. Recognition of this scale of violence has highlighted the urgent need for HIV programmes that address violence against women, and the underlying causes of gender inequality.

This evaluation aims to measure the impact and effectiveness of SASA! - an Activist Kit for Preventing Violence against Women and HIV. The SASA! approach aims to prevent violence against women and HIV by focusing on the root cause of women's vulnerability to both: the imbalance of power in intimate relationships. The intervention aims to mobilise communities to reassess their acceptability of violence and gender inequality. It supports the development of community activists, and engages with key stakeholders, including local and religious leaders, the police and health workers.

The impact evaluation of this intervention is a randomised controlled trial that uses both a quantitative and a qualitative approach.  The evaluation will explore the impact of the intervention on gender-related norms and behaviours and on the community’s responses to incidents of violence against women. It will also explore the cost-effectiveness of this intervention for a possible project scale-up.

Microfinance and other financial services provide credit to the poor to increase their economic opportunities. Over 150 million people access microfinance services globally. However, there is little evidence assessing whether microfinance has improved the lives of the poor.
An important limiting factor for the development of small-scale businesses and for the productive use of microfinance is the level of human capital among the entrepreneurs.

To improve the impact of microcredit, it may also be important that borrowers receive training in business development services. This training includes management and vocational skills training, as well as marketing and technical assistance. Although recent literature suggests that such training can play an important role in improving human capital for small-scale businesses, not much is known about its impact.

This study will evaluate the business development services training provided by TYM fund, the largest microfinance organization for poor women in Northern Vietnam. The trainings are based on the five-day "Gender and Entrepreneurship Together" training package provided by the International Labour Organization.

The study will assess both the economic and social benefits of the training for poor women and look at its impact on women’s empowerment in decision-making. It will also evaluate the impact of the training on household and institutional outcomes.

Agriculture is the predominant occupation in rural Bangladesh and is the main source of livelihood for the poor. But a significant proportion of the rural farmers access cultivable lands through the tenancy market. These small and marginal sharecroppers depend largely on credit borrowed from informal lenders at high interest rates to meet their farming costs.

Since conventional microcredit is ineffective in this market, BRAC introduced the Borga Chashi Unnayon Programme - Share cropper Development Programme - a customized credit service for farmers. The Government of Bangladesh is providing approximately US$7 million to this national programme, which aims to have an impact on employment generation, poverty alleviation, human resource development, nutrition and food security.

Under this credit programme, participant farmers receive loans ranging from Taka 5,000 to 20,000 (US$ 70 to US$ 280) at a flat interest rate of 10 per cent with three payment options. One third of the loan amount is realized through monthly installments while the rest is paid back during the harvest period.

This study will examine the impact of the programme on the livelihoods of participating farmers, farm productivity, food security and nutritional status. It will also assess the scalability and replicability of the programme in other poor countries.