Person: del Ninno, Carlo
Global Practice for Social Protection and Labor, The World Bank
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Social protection
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Global Practice for Social Protection and Labor, The World Bank
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Last updated: January 31, 2023
Biography
Carlo del Ninno is a senior economist in the Social Protection Africa Unit of the World Bank, working on several aspects of safety net policies and programs. He previously worked in the Social Protection and Labor practice of the Human Development Network at the World Bank. Over the past 10 years, he has worked on analytical and operational issues on safety net programs covering several countries in Africa and South Asia. Before joining the World Bank, he worked on food security for the International Food Policy Research Institute in Bangladesh, and on poverty analysis in several countries for the Policy Research Division of the World Bank and Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and has published on safety nets, food policy, and food security.
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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
Publication Reaching the Poor: Cash Transfer Program Targeting in Cameroon(Elsevier, 2016-07) Stoeffler, Quentin; Mills, Bradford; del Ninno, CarloIdentifying and selecting poor households with efficient targeting methods is essential for effective poverty alleviation programs. This paper assesses the ex-post performance of two popular targeting mechanisms, Proxy Means Testing (PMT) and Community-Based Targeting (CBT), in a pilot cash transfer program in Cameroon. Several indicators and metrics to measure each method’s performance in terms of inclusion of poor households and exclusion of non-poor households are employed. Results consistently show that CBT performs poorly in terms of selecting households with low per capita consumption when compared to PMT. CBT appears to select households with low physical and human capital, regardless of actual consumption level. However, CBT also shows more variability in the selection decision than PMT even when alternative poverty definitions are used as robustness tests. The PMT method used in the pilot slightly outperforms other targeting methods (hybrid, alternative PMT, and universal targeting with equal budget), but errors remain high when selecting 35% of the population for program participation. The results suggest caution is needed in employing CBT methods to select households with low per capita consumption in an environment where poverty levels are high and administrative capacities are limited. CBT performance may be improved through more uniform and consistent guidance on program selection criteria and process, including explicit criteria that enable CBT monitoring, as well as a better integration between PMT and CBT.Publication Safety Nets in Africa : Effective Mechanisms to Reach the Poor and Most Vulnerable: Des méthodes efficaces pour cibler les populations pauvres et vulnérables en Afrique Sub-Saharienne(Washington, DC: World Bank; and Agence Française de Développement, 2015-01-29) del Ninno, Carlo; del Ninno, Carlo; Mills, BradfordThe need for safety nets in Sub-Saharan Africa is vast. In addition to being the world’s poorest region, Sub-Saharan Africa is also one of the most unequal. In this context, redistribution must be seen as a legitimate way to fight poverty and ensure shared prosperity - and all the more so in countries where growth is driven by extractive industries that are not labor-intensive and often employ very few poor people. Given that most African countries face difficult decisions about how to allocate limited resources among a number of social programs, evidence is important. Do Safety Net programs actually benefit the poorest people? This book demonstrates with empirical evidence that it is possible to reach the poorest and most vulnerable people with safety net programs, and provides lessons for the effective use of targeting methods to achieve this outcome in the region.Publication Social Protection Programs for Africa's Drylands(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-08-09) Coll-Black, Sarah; del Ninno, Carlo; Fallavier, PierreSocial Protection Programs for Africa’s Drylands explores the role of social protection in promoting the well-being and prosperity of people living in dryland regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, with a specific focus on the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. Based on a review of recent experience, it argues that social protection policies and programs have an important role in promoting the resilience of the people residing in these areas. Social protection programs, when well designed and carefully implemented at scale, can reduce vulnerability to droughts and other shocks and promote coping capacity. If present trends continue, by 2030 dryland regions of East and West Africa will be home to an estimated 429 million people, up to 24 percent of whom will be living in chronic poverty. Many others will depend on livelihood strategies that are sensitive to the shocks that will hit the region with increasing frequency and severity, making them vulnerable to falling into transient poverty. Social protection programs will be needed in the drylands to provide support to those unable to meet their basic needs. Some of these people will require long-term support, while others will require periodic short-term support because of income losses due to shocks (for example, crop failure following a drought) or as a result of lifecycle changes (for example, loss of a breadwinner). Safety net programs can increase resilience in the short term by improving coping capacity of vulnerable households. Rapidly scalable safety nets that provide cash, food, or other resources to shock-affected households can allow them to recover from unexpected shocks. Scaling up an existing safety net program can be far less expensive than relying on appeals for humanitarian assistance to meet urgent needs. Social protection programs can increase resilience over the longer term by reducing sensitivity to shocks of vulnerable households especially if combined with other development programs. Providing predictable support to chronically poor households and enabling them to invest in productive assets and access basic social services can effectively reduce these households’ sensitivity to future shocks, help them participate in the growth process, and take advantage of the investments made in agricultural and pastoralist activities proposed in the drylands.Publication Adaptive Social Protection: Building Resilience to Shocks(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-05-20) Bowen, Thomas; del Ninno, Carlo; Andrews, Colin; Coll-Black, Sarah; Gentilini, Ugo; Johnson, Kelly; Kawasoe, Yasuhiro; Kryeziu, Adea; Maher, Barry; Williams, AshaAdaptive social protection (ASP) helps to build the resilience of poor and vulnerable households to the impacts of large, covariate shocks, such as natural disasters, economic crises, pandemics, conflict, and forced displacement. Through the provision of transfers and services directly to these households, ASP supports their capacity to prepare for, cope with, and adapt to the shocks they face—before, during, and after these shocks occur. Over the long term, by supporting these three capacities, ASP can provide a pathway to a more resilient state for households that may otherwise lack the resources to move out of chronically vulnerable situations. Adaptive Social Protection: Building Resilience to Shocks outlines an organizing framework for the design and implementation of ASP, providing insights into the ways in which social protection systems can be made more capable of building household resilience. By way of its four building blocks—programs, information, finance, and institutional arrangements and partnerships—the framework highlights both the elements of existing social protection systems that are the cornerstones for building household resilience, as well as the additional investments that are central to enhancing their ability to generate these outcomes. In this report, the ASP framework and its building blocks have been elaborated primarily in relation to natural disasters and associated climate change. Nevertheless, many of the priorities identified within each building block are also pertinent to the design and implementation of ASP across other types of shocks, providing a foundation for a structured approach to the advancement of this rapidly evolving and complex agenda.