There has been a fair amount of discussion in this blog of multifaceted, poverty graduation programs. Berk covered results from a big multi-country study, as well as some related qualitative work and Markus has talked about longer run impacts from Bandiera and co. These can be complex, expensive programs. There are serious questions about whether they can be scaled by governments and whether some components might be more cost effective than others.

Today we bring you some neat new results from a paper that we wrote with B Karimou, D Karlan, H Kazianga, W Pariente, C Thomas, C Udry and K Wright, and came out in Nature a week ago.

The setting is Niger, one of the poorer countries on the planet. The women who are to be the main beneficiaries face a range of challenges, for example: 7 percent of them are literate, they live on average over an hour from the nearest market, and three quarters of them live in households who reported changing consumption in response to a shock in the last year. - blog.wb.org/blogs

A version of this article appears in the print on May 06, 2022 of The Himalayan Times.