Randomized control trials and qualitative impacts: what do they tell us about the immediate and long-term assessments of productive safety nets for women in extreme poverty in West Bengal?

Kabeer, Naila; Datta, Sanchari

doi:10.35648/20.500.12413/11781/ii346

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…In 2017, I returned with Sanchari Datta, the researcher who had carried out our field interviews in 2011, to find out how these 20 participants had fared over time [23]. This visit brought home to us some of the limitations of relying on purely qualitative interviews to gain insights into longer term impacts.…”

Section: West Bengal India: Homogenizing Povertymentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Protection, Livelihoods and ‘Structural Gaps’: Impact Assessment as Stories of Social Change

Kabeer

2024

LSE Public Policy Review

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Impact assessments form a significant strand of research in development studies because they assess the extent to which policy efforts to bring about desired forms of change in a society succeed in their objectives. In frequently under-researched countries in the Global South, these assessments can tell important stories about how change happens in such contexts, what promotes it and what blocks it, but only if they incorporate methodologies that enable them to do so. In the absence of such methodologies, assessments merely provide information on whether an intervention worked or not, but not how, why (or why not) and for whom. This paper uses examples of impact assessments of social protection measures in the Global South to demonstrate how a poor understanding of gender, livelihoods and households in different contexts can lead to conclusions that either misrepresent local realities or fail to capture relevant aspects of them.

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Section: West Bengal India: Homogenizing Povertymentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Protection, Livelihoods and ‘Structural Gaps’: Impact Assessment as Stories of Social Change

Kabeer

2024

LSE Public Policy Review

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“…One important point to consider before the implementation of any development intervention is that the framework of the program its ideas and values is clearly understood by the implementation agents to get the desired results from it (Kabeer et al, 2012). In the intervention made in villages of Pakistan (Sindh) by CGAP 13 , the participants of the study were given goats and hens to help them generate a steady source of income.…”

Section: Summary and Concluding Remarks And Policy Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conflicting Choices: Lump Sum Transfer or Periodic Cash Transfer. Evidence from Sindh, Pakistan

Shabbar

2023

Forman J. econ. stud.

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Evaluating the long-term impacts of social assistance programs is usually not possible as pure control groups dissolve into treated ones. This paper makes use of data where the treated and control groups remained mostly unmarred. We examine two types of Pakistani social assistance i.e., lump sum transfer (LST) versus unconditional cash transfer (UCT) and determine which is more effective in enhancing household income after a decade. The UCT has continued over time thus enabling us to see if there is any cumulative effect of this in comparison to the onetime LST received to the treatment group. The setup of initial randomization of beneficiaries to treatment and control status has not received any form of researcher intervention and thus continues to induce random variation. For evaluation, a cross-sectional survey is conducted in a district of the Sindh province of Pakistan. Propensity Score Matching is employed across recipient and control households to evaluate the treatment effects. The matching is done for households receiving LST and UCT and also between LST and non-recipients of any assistance. The empirical analysis suggests that the LST permanently increases the total household income. The difference in the household incomes of LST and UCT recipients, in the long run, is large and significant. The same is true for LST recipients and non-recipients of any form of assistance. Sensitivity analysis indicates no hidden bias. Considering limited fiscal space availability, understanding which type of social assistance can be more effective for social mobility, is an important public policy decision.

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Resilience, Vulnerability, and Social Isolation: Barriers to Poverty Reduction in War

Lake,

Pierotti,

Alik-Lagrange

2023

International Studies Quarterly

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The majority of the world’s ultra-poor live in conflict-affected environments. Poverty reduction efforts are increasingly attempting to target the most vulnerable inhabitants of these settings. Few studies have so far examined their impacts. Against the backdrop of one of the largest humanitarian crises in recent years, survey data from the Central African Republic demonstrates that a year after the conclusion of a large social safety net program, the poorest female participants did not benefit proportionately to other women and men. We draw on 257 in-depth qualitative interviews in extremely difficult-to-access conflict-affected sites across the country to explore the puzzle of why the most vulnerable inhabitants of conflict-affected settings may fail to benefit equally from poverty reduction programs. We demonstrate that conditions of social isolation—rather than poverty itself—create two specific barriers to long-term benefits. First, social isolation means that the poorest women recipients lack the social support networks that permit others to respond to conflict-related shocks without draining all their new income on emergency spending. Second, small social networks create a shortage of labor and higher start-up costs for new revenue-generating activities, thereby preventing spending on investment opportunities. These factors highlight the social barriers to poverty reduction, which are often intensified by shocks born from war, that material aid alone fails to redress.

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Randomized control trials and qualitative impacts: what do they tell us about the immediate and long-term assessments of productive safety nets for women in extreme poverty in West Bengal?

Cited by 4 publications

References 6 publications

Social Protection, Livelihoods and ‘Structural Gaps’: Impact Assessment as Stories of Social Change

Social Protection, Livelihoods and ‘Structural Gaps’: Impact Assessment as Stories of Social Change

Conflicting Choices: Lump Sum Transfer or Periodic Cash Transfer. Evidence from Sindh, Pakistan

Resilience, Vulnerability, and Social Isolation: Barriers to Poverty Reduction in War

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