Laura B. Rawlings

• World Bank

This paper presents a framework for designing and implementing social protection and labor (SP&L) systems in middle and low income countries. Although the term'system'is used to describe a country's set of social protection programs, these tend to operate independently with little or no coordination even when they have the same policy objective and...

Over the last decade, conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become one of the most widely adopted anti-poverty initiatives in the developing world. Inspired particularly by Mexico's successful Progresa/Oportunidades program, CCTs are viewed as an effective way to provide basic income support while building childrens' human capital. These pr...

This note reviews recent World Bank experience with projects using results-based lending in Social Protection and Labor (SP&L) in preparation for stepped-up engagement under the proposed Program-for-Results (P4R). The P4R is expected to be launched in 2012. Given the already strong use of P4R-type approaches in SP&L, the portfolio focus on sectoral...

The main focus of the social protection and labor portfolio is on strengthening client's institutional capacity in the design and implementation of programs, but projects are not well equipped to track progress in this area. Correspondingly, there is a need to strengthen approaches to measuring and monitoring a'missing middle'of service delivery, p...

Conditional cash transfers are a departure from more traditional approaches to social assistance that represents an innovative and increasingly popular channel for the delivery of social services. Conditional cash transfers provide money to poor families contingent upon certain behaviour, usually investments in human capital such as sending childre...

Incl. bibl., abstract. Several developing economies have recently introduced conditional cash transfer programs, which provide money to poor families contingent on certain behavior, usually investments in human capital, such as sending children to school or bringing them to health centers. The approach is both an alternative to more traditional soc...

This article reviews the results of an impact evaluation of small-scale rural infrastructure projects in health, water, and education financed by the Bolivian Social Investment Fund

This article examines whether fise investments---in primary schools, rural health posts, latrines, and water and sewerage systems---are targeted to poor communities and poor households, improve access to basic social services, and help improve health and education outcomes. In doing so, the article contributes to the thin literature on the effects...

Unlike most development initiatives, conditional cash transfer programs recently introduced in the Latin America and the Caribbean region have been subject to rigorous evaluations of their effectiveness. These programs provide money to poor families, conditional on certain behavior, usually investments in human capital-such as sending children to s...

Unlike most development initiatives, conditional cash transfer programs recently introduced in Latin America and the Caribbean have been subject to rigorous evaluations of their effectiveness. These programs provide money to poor families conditional upon certain behavior, usually investments in human capital such as sending children to school or b...

This study reviews Nicaragua's school autonomy reform -- whether or not the state schools that joined the reform exercise greater autonomy over their own management and operations than state schools that did not participate in the reform, and whether or not the local stakeholders in the socalled autonomous schools perceive an increase in their infl...

This article reviews the results of an impact evaluation of small-scale rural infrastructure projects in health, water, and education financed by the Bolivian Social Investment Fund. The impact evaluation used panel data on project beneficiaries and control or comparison groups and applied several evaluation methodologies. An experimental design ba...

The benefit incidence and impact of projects financed by the Nicaraguan Emergency Social Investment Fund are investigated using a sample of beneficiaries, a national household survey, and two distinct comparison groups. The first group is constructed on the basis of geographic proximity between similar facilities and their corresponding communities...

This paper addresses whether projects financed by the Nicaraguan Emergency Social Investment Fund (Fondo de Inversin Social de Emergencia - FISE) in primary schools, rural health posts, latrines and water and sewerage systems (i) are targeted to poor communities and poor households, (ii) improve access to basic social services and (iii) have an imp...

The Bolivian Social Investment Fund (SIF) is a financial institution that promotes sustainable investments in the social sectors, principally in the areas of health, education, and sanitation. This article shows how to use preintervention data collected for evaluating the SIF to improve the targeting of a program, to test the quality of the evaluat...

Incl. bibl.

This report describes and reviews Colombia's secondary school voucher program. The program which is targeted at poor students has reached more than 100,000 students since it began in 1992. The cost of the vouchers is shared by central and local governments, with the central government financing 80 percent and participating municipalities financing...

Seven case studies—from Bolivia, Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Taiwan (China), and Turkey—demonstrate the feasibility of conducting rigorous impact evaluations in developing countries using randomized control designs. This experience, covering a wide variety of settings and social programs, offers lessons for task managers and policymaker...

Despite its growing popularity, school-based management is seldom evaluated systematically with respect to its impact on student performance. This study examines the impact of the current school autonomy reform in Nicaragua on learning within an educational production function approach. Results show that autonomous public schools are indeed making...

Incl. bibl.