Southern Africa is undergoing a food crisis of surprising scale and novelty. The familiar culprits of drought and mismanagement of national strategies are implicated. However, this crisis is distinct from conventional drought-induced food shortages with respect to those vulnerable to starvation, and the course of impoverishment and recovery. We propose that these new aspects to the food crisis ...

Progresa/Oportunidades Progresa/Oportunidades is a conditional cash transfer programme administered by the Federal Government of Mexico. Under this initiative, direct cash payments are provided to eligible poor and vulnerable households, who send their children to primary and secondary schools, and whose mothers and children receive regular preventive care at local health clinics. In addition, ...

Considerations of risk and vulnerability are key to understanding the dynamics of poverty. This study conceives vulnerability as expected poverty and illustrates a methodology to empirically assess household vulnerability using pseudo panel data derived from repeated cross sections augmented with historical information on shocks. Application of the methodology to data from rural Kenya shows tha...

This paper presents evidence on the relationship between shocks to relative male wages, and changes in household consumption in Mexico during the 1990s decade, which is a period characterized by high volatility. Apart from performing analysis of this type for Mexico for the first time, the paper has mainly two contributions. The first is the use of alternative data sources to construct instrume...

BACKGROUND The 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) regulates >170,000 public water systems to protect health, but not >13 million private wells. State and local government requirements for private well water testing are rare and inconsistent; the responsibility to ensure water safety remains with individual households. Over the last two decades, geogenic arsenic has emerged as a significant pub...

OBJECTIVE To provide data about wealth distribution in visceral leishmaniasis (VL)-affected communities compared to that of the general population of Bihar State, India. METHODS After extensive disease risk mapping, 16 clusters with high VL transmission were selected in Bihar. An exhaustive census of all households in the clusters was conducted and socio-economic household characteristics wer...

Conflict, Food Price Shocks, and Food Insecurity: The Experience of Afghan Households Using nationally-representative household survey data and confidential geo-coded data on violence, we examine the linkages between conflict, food insecurity, and food price shocks in Afghanistan. Spatial mappings of the raw data reveal large variations in levels of food insecurity and conflict across the count...

This study addresses the socio-economic impact of AIDS on rural livelihoods in Benue State, Nigeria, where HIV prevalence is 9.3% but the number of AIDS cases is still relatively low. About 6% of the study households had experienced illness and death classified as AIDS, and reported high costs in terms of expenditures and time spent on care, funerals and mourning. These demands on time affected...

Background Assessment of the impact of emergency cash transfer programs on child nutritional status has been difficult to achieve due to the considerable logistic and ethical constraints that characterize humanitarian settings. Methods We present the findings from a quasi-experimental longitudinal study of a conditional emergency cash transfer program implemented by Concern Worldwide in 2012 ...

Beginning in 1990, Mongolia, a former client state of what was then the Soviet Union, undertook liberal economic reforms. These came as a great shock to Mongolia and Mongolians, and resulted in food shortages, reports of famine, widespread unemployment, and a collapse of public health and health care. Although economic conditions have stabilized in recent years, unemployment and poverty are sti...