Report Series: From Evidence to Policy
This is a note series on learning what works, from the Human Development Network.
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Can Disadvantaged Kids Ever Catch Up with Better-off Peers?
(Washington, DC, 2013-05)The World Bank is focused on developing and supporting programs that help children reach their potential and live lives free of poverty. To help build a body of evidence of what works, the World Bank financed an evaluation of a program in Jamaica that targeted mothers of babies stunted due to malnutrition. The mothers received either support or guidance on how to encourage their babies' development through play and language, or nutritional supplements, or a combination of the two. The children whose mothers had received the extra guidance were doing as well financially as the less disadvantaged (and non-stunted) children. This study is a rare look at the effects of early childhood intervention over the decades, giving policymakers and development experts tangible proof of the potential effects of early childhood development programs. A rare long-term study of the effects of an early childhood development program shows that children's lives can be improved by ensuring that they have the right stimulation and emotional support as babies and toddlers. -
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Pakistan : Can Low-Cost Private Schools Improve Learning?
(Washington, DC, 2012-10)Education is central to giving children the building blocks for a life free of poverty. When schools fail to deliver quality education, children are left without the skills and knowledge they need to realize their capabilities and become productive adults. This isn't just a problem of insufficient supplies or poor facilities. Policymakers and education experts in developing countries often grapple with the problems of accountability: it can be hard to create mechanisms for holding schools responsible for student achievement, but across the world, promising innovations are being introduced. The World Bank is working hard to help countries meet the United Nations Millennium Goal of universal primary education, and to ensure that schools teach effectively and students can learn. To understand whether low-cost private schools can improve access to education and promote student learning especially in cases where public schools aren't succeeding the World Bank carried out an evaluation of a new public-private education partnership in Pakistan at the request of the government. Private schools in the program receive a per-student monthly subsidy in exchange for waiving tuition for all students and meeting a minimum pass rate in a standardized academic test administered to students. -
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Before Crisis Hits : Can Public Works Programs Increase Food Security?
(Washington, DC, 2012-09)Fighting famine is basic to ending poverty and saving lives. Emergency aid, which arrives after the food has run out, isn't enough. Households most in need of emergency aid often don't have enough food during other times of the year, posing a broader challenge for devising programs that can cut hunger and build food security. Social protection programs, including grants, social assistance and public works programs are one way to transform people's lives and protect them both before and when disaster strikes. What works and under what circumstances is what policymakers and development experts want to know, especially those focused on famine breakouts in Africa and Asia. In 2003, the Ethiopian government partnered with donors and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) to create a working coalition to improve food security for the poor. The result was the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), which went into effect in 2005. This program, the largest of its kind in Africa, initially targeted 7.6 million people (8 percent of Ethiopia's population) who suffered chronic food shortages and lived in areas prone to drought. Through a public works component and direct grants for those who can't work, the program aims to help households meet their food needs, keeping people fed and reducing the need to sell off productive assets. Ethiopian policymakers and international donors have long struggled with the challenge of reducing poverty amid weather shocks that disrupt harvests and threaten households with starvation. After years of emergency aid programs designed to provide short-term relief, both Ethiopia and donors wanted to create a program that could help people secure and build their lives, rather than just react to disaster. The result is Ethiopia's PSNP, which uses public works employment, social transfers and an agricultural asset-building program, to stabilize and strengthen poor households. -
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Can Cash Grants Help Create Jobs and Stability?
(Washington, DC, 2011-12)Policymakers throughout the world struggle to boost employment. Creating jobs or giving people the right training to get jobs is not only good economics, but especially in developing countries, it may be a way to reduce social instability and with it the threat of crime and unrest. In the push to figure out what works, development organizations and governments are looking beyond the more traditional voucher and microfinance tools to decentralized programs that give cash grants and leave it to recipients to decide how to use the money. At the World Bank, committed to ending poverty and we are working to help meet the United Nations millennium development goals, including eradicating extreme poverty by raising incomes and making sure everyone has decent employment. To help policymakers judge the effectiveness of different approaches to building employment opportunities, the World Bank sponsored an evaluation of a Government of Uganda program that gave young men and women cash grants to start new businesses or get training. Based on mid-term results two years after the intervention, the Ugandan program made significant impacts: Beneficiaries reported large increases in skilled employment and incomes, and modest gains in social cohesion and stability. Researchers and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) partnered with the Ugandan government to evaluate the effectiveness of the youth opportunities program, introduced in 2006 to raise incomes and employment among young adults aged 16 to 35 in the country's northern region by offering them cash grants for training and busi-ness materials. To qualify, young adults had to organize in groups of 10 to 30 people and submit a proposal for a grant to cover training programs and what tools and materials they needed to run a business. Helping young adults find jobs is a key goal of policymakers in emerging economies, where high rates of unemployment are a potential social and economic problem. Many countries are working with vouchers, training programs and microfinance to raise employment opportunities. Uganda, which over the past decade emerged from a brutal armed conflict in the north, has been working to alleviate poverty and raise jobs options in this hard-hit region. In a new approach, the government funded a program that gave unsupervised cash grants to young adults who drew up business plans explaining what they would do with the money. -
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What's the Long-Term Impact of Conditional Cash Transfers on Education?
(Washington, DC, 2013-06)Cash transfers are used around the world to better encourage poor families to take advantage of educational offerings by offering financial incentives that can boost their income. The Colombia study shows that these can be an important tool not only for encouraging families to enroll their children in school, but also keeping them there. Indeed, the results indicate that students whose families received the cash transfers were more likely to graduate high school, an educational milestone that opens doors to higher education and in developing countries especially, increases employment opportunities. The study showed that higher enrollment, and improved graduation rates, didn't necessarily translate into better learning. Students whose families received the cash transfers didn't show improvements in test scores when compared with students whose families didn't receive the money. It may be that teachers need better training to address the needs of low-income students, or more resources may be required for struggling students. Future research could consider linking cash transfers to school performance, to see whether this incentive encourages students (and their parents) to pay more attention to learning. As part of this, researchers would have to consider what support low-income households might need to monitor and assist their children in school. The Colombia study makes an important contribution to the body of evidence on the effectiveness of cash transfers in keeping kids in school and raising graduation rates. The next step is to understand how cash transfers, or other programs, can successfully be used to boost learning too. -
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Can Scholarships Help Keep Kids in School?
(World Bank, Washington DC, 2013-02)Cambodia has had numerous scholarship programs funded by the government and outside donors. A government program supported by the World Bank's Cambodia Education Sector Support Project was launched to test the optimal scholarship amount and measure the effect on both boys and girls. The program targeted 100 lower secondary (middle) schools that were not participating in other scholarship programs, focusing on those in poor areas and where non-enrollment was high. The scholarships had a substantial effect on student enrollment and attendance in 7th and 8th grades. More girls than boys received grants because they ranked higher for the risk of dropping out. The Cambodia study shows that scholarships can be an effective tool for encouraging students to stay in school after completing primary school-even in a low income setting. Boys and girls can benefit equally and that encouraging greater school attendance does not mean that the student's siblings will be expected by their families to make up the lost household or outside work time. Success depends on finding the optimal way to support children who might otherwise drop-out, both in terms of encouraging enrollment and ensuring that once in school, they can learn. -
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Do Grants to Communities Lead to Better Health and Education?
(Washington, DC, 2013-02)Indonesia, like many middle income countries, has difficulty providing universal access to education and adequate access to healthcare, particularly in poor and rural areas. To tackle these problems, the Government of Indonesia launched two large-scale programs in 2007. The programs both relied on cash transfers, but one targeted households and one targeted communities. In both cases, the transfers were designed to encourage families to meet basic health and education indicators, including prenatal visits for pregnant women, childhood immunization, regular weight monitoring, and school attendance. To push communities to focus on the most effective policies, a portion of subsequent year grants is based on how well communities do in meeting the previous year's health and education targets. In this way, the program takes aspects of conditional cash transfer and pay-for-performance programs and reformulates them to encourage community-wide performance and accountability. In order to test the effectiveness of linking grants to the previous year's performance, a second version of the program was carried out in which communities received the money irrespective of the previous year's performance. The grants have ranged from an average of $8,500 in 2007 to $18,200 in 2009. This World Bank supported program now reaches about 5.4 million people. -
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Do Wage Subsidies Help Young Women Get Jobs?
(Washington, DC, 2012-12)Unemployment among young adults is a problem throughout the world, and it's of particular concern in the Middle East, where half the population is under the age of 25 and more than a quarter of those aged 15-24 are out of work. Young women fare worse than men when it comes to finding jobs. Cultural norms can discourage them from working or traveling on their own, meaning that some young women never even make the transition into the workforce. How to reduce youth unemployment in general and give women a boost in particular is of key concern to policymakers and development groups trying to make a difference. But it's not yet clear what steps can reverse the problem. The World Bank understands that skills development and jobs creation is necessary to improving people's lives and helping countries meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. In order to build evidence of what works, the World Bank funded the Jordan New Work Opportunities for Women (NOW) pilot program, which was designed to encourage employment of female college graduates in Jordan through wage subsidy vouchers and soft skills training. Built into the project was an evaluation to measure the impact. Researchers found that vouchers did boost employment but only for as long as the vouchers were valid. After that, the new hires were let go or left their jobs. The high labor force participation rate is reflected in the baseline survey, when more than 90 percent of the young women said they wanted to look for work after graduation and more than 80 percent preferred the public sector. They also had a very positive outlook, with 82 percent saying they expected to have a job within 6 months (the reality is that 40 percent of community college graduates find at least one job within the first year and a half after entering the labor market). -
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Can Public Works Programs Help the Poor During Crises?
(Washington, DC, 2013-01)Economic crises can be particularly arduous for poor and vulnerable people. In particular, job losses stemming from economic downturns undercut the ability of more vulnerable households to support themselves. Public works programs, which help sustain poor households through temporary employment, are one method used by governments to lessen the impacts of crises. The World Bank is focused on helping countries end poverty. Key to this knows which programs do and do not yield tangible results. To help policymakers assess the effectiveness of Latvia's public works program, the World Bank supported an evaluation of the government-sponsored public works initiative, which was launched in response to the global financial crisis of 2008-2010. The evaluation found that the program successfully reached its intended target, helping Latvia's worst-off cope with the crisis by increasing their short-term incomes. For policymakers and development experts, this evaluation underscores the usefulness of public works programs as emergency social safety net instruments even in upper-middle income countries. -
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Can Entrepreneurship Training Improve Work Opportunities for College Graduates?
(Washington, DC, 2013-04)Improving educational achievement for youth doesn't always result in better employment opportunities, and this can be especially acute in developing countries. As the World Bank's 2013 world development report highlights, the mismatch between the skills and aspirations of college graduates and the realities of labor markets not only limits a country's economic development, but also affects social cohesion. Joblessness and underemployment are viewed as some of the triggers of the Arab Spring, which started with Tunisia's jasmine revolution in early 2011. In Tunisia, the World Bank worked with the government to evaluate a program designed to give university students entrepreneurship training and assistance developing a business plan. The evaluation found that the program increased self-employment and helped students develop some skills associated with successful entrepreneurship. The lessons learned from the evaluation will help policymakers and development experts hone programs that deliver an impact.