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School meals have been introduced as an important policy tool to improve education outcomes and pupil’s nutritional status. This study uses a unique and large-scale randomised field experiment to assess the effectiveness of such programmes on pupils’s performance (test scores in French, mathematics and the aggregate) and on the internal efficiency of schools (enrolment, promotion, repetition and dropout) in rural Senegal. We show that attrition and non-compliance occurred not at random in the experiment. Relying on the average treatment effect and the complier effects, we find that the programme has a positive and significant impact on pupils’ scores and on the enrolment rate. However, the repetition rate increased. The intervention has a marked gender effect. Cost-effectiveness analysis shows that deworming intervention is more cost-effective than school meals.

In the last decade, sub-Saharan African countries have taken various measures to plan for and adapt to floods in order to reduce exposure and its impacts on human health, livelihoods, and infrastructure. Measuring the effects of such initiatives on social resilience is challenging as it requires to combine multiple variables and indicators that embrace thematic, spatial, and temporal dimensions inherent to the resilience thinking and concept. In this research, we apply a subjective resilience indicator framework and a before-after-control-intervention (BACI) evaluation to empirically measure the impacts of the "Live with Water" (LWW) project on suburban households in Dakar, Senegal. Our framework is based on an empirically measurable resilience index that combines anticipatory, adaptive, and absorptive capacity-considered as structural dimensions-with the concept of transformative capacity-considered as a temporal reconfiguration of the first three dimensions. Our finding let us estimate that the project increased the absorptive and the anticipatory capacities by 10.6% and 4.6%, respectively. However, adaptive capacity remained unchanged. This may be explained by the fact that the project was more successful in building drainage and physical infrastructures, rather than improving multi-level organizations and strategies to cope with existing flood events. Decoupling implementation time between physical infrastructures and longer term institutional and livelihood based support could both improve projects' results and their evaluations.