The latest impact evaluation note looks at whether mobile money benefits households in poor and remote areas of Northern Uganda and finds large increases in non-farm self-employment and food security.
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This paper studies the effect of rolling out mobile money agents in rural Northern Uganda. In a randomized experiment, 168 areas were randomly selected to receive an agent in 2017, with another 163 areas serving as a control group.
... See More + Administrative data on mobile money transactions suggest that the agent rollout increased the probability of sending and receiving peer-to-peer transfers. Data from a 2018 survey of more than 4,500 households show that the agent rollout led to cost-savings for remittance transactions. It also doubled the nonfarm self-employment rate, from 3.4 to 6.4 percent, and reduced the fraction of households with very low food security from 62.9 to 47.2 percent, in areas far from a bank branch. The analysis finds no effect on savings, agricultural outcomes, or poverty. Overall, the findings add new evidence that mobile money can improve livelihoods even in poor and remote settings.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8913 JUN 25, 2019
This report is the result of a collaboration between the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank Group (WBG).
... See More + Repatriation or the return of refugees to their country of origin has been rarely studied, and data on their socio-economic outcomes is sparsely available. In such a context, the World Bank and UNHCR teams attempted to make good use of the existing data sources and complemented it with new data collection methods to better understand the patterns and characteristics of recent Afghan refugee returns. More specifically, the team attempted to analytically connect insights between different data sources to explore (albeit imperfectly) questions of selection among Afghans who remained in Pakistan and those documented returnees who returned to Afghanistan.
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Food insecurity and malnutrition are some of the most serious manifestations of protracted crises, which disrupt livelihoods and food systems. Over half of the Afghan population, approximately 16 million people, lives below the poverty line, a sharp increase over the last decade.
... See More + Rural poverty remains consistently higher than urban poverty, although the deterioration in welfare has become more widespread across the country. The high poverty rates represent the combined effect of stagnating economic growth, increasing demographic pressures, and a deteriorating security situation in the context of an already impoverished economy and society where human capital and livelihoods have been eroded by decades of conflict and instability. Food insecurity has increased in line with poverty and in 2016-17, 13 million Afghans (or 45 percent of the population) were food insecure (deficient in meeting minimum norms for calories). Of these, an estimated 3.9 million were very severely, 4.1 million severely and 5.0 million moderately food insecure, with a larger number and proportion of the rural population affected by food insecurity. In 2017-18, Afghanistan experienced a drought which affected 22 of its 34 provinces, exacerbating food insecurity, triggering internal displacement of people, and adversely affecting investments in the 2018-19 agricultural season. Changing climatic conditions, a growing population, and other environmental stressors will likely continue to have significant impact on food security going forward. The objectives of the analysis presented in this note are twofold. First, it provides an overview of how the Afghan population fares in terms of food security by providing in-depth analysis of a range of food security indicators during the time period 2007 and 2016. Second, the analysis enables us to identify contributing factors to food insecurity such as inaccessibility of markets and losses in self-production of food.
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This brief highlights five key policy-relevant findings about food insecurity in Afghanistan prior to the 2018 drought. These findings are based on analysis of the Afghanistan Living Conditions Surveys.
... See More + Food insecurity and malnutrition are some of the most serious manifestations of protracted crises as they disrupt livelihoods and markets. Afghans have lived through foreign intervention, civil war, insurgency, and widespread insecurity for decades, severely disrupting Afghanistan’s economic growth trajectory. Over half of the Afghan population, approximately 16 million people, lives below the poverty line in 2016-17, a sharp increase over the last decade. Food security has increased in line with poverty and 13 million Afghans (or 45 percent of the population) are food insecure. Of these, an estimated 3.9 million are very severely, 4.1 million severely and 5.0 million are moderately food insecure with a larger number and proportion of the rural population affected by food insecurity. Changing climatic conditions, a growing population, and other environmental stressors will likely have significant impact on food security going forward. The diet of the Afghan population is not only inadequate in quantity, it is also qualitatively poor. Overall, half of the population has poor or borderline food consumption, highest in rural residents and 30 percent of Afghans do not consume adequate protein (at least 50 grams per person per day) from their food basket. Inadequate food quantity and quality can particularly have severe effects on the nearly 1.4 million children under the age of five who are vulnerable to malnutrition. It is important to put the timing of the survey findings in context. The latest round of ALCS was collected prior to Afghanistan entering drought conditions due to deficit rain and snowfall of past years. The impacts of the current drought are severe in some areas of Afghanistan and an estimated 2.6 million people nationwide require urgent humanitarian action to reduce their food deficits and to protect their livelihoods, survive until the next harvest, and prepare for next year’s planting season.
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The overall macro-economic and security context in the country since 2007 can be broken into two distinct phases, pre- and post- the 2014 security transition, when security responsibilities were transferred from international troops to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).
... See More + This note assesses the welfare and labor market implications of the security transition for the Afghan population. It finds that: (i) economic growth during the pre-transition phase, while high, translated into welfare gains only for the richest 20 percent of the population, who benefited from greater salaried employment opportunities; and (ii) as growth declined after the transition, poverty increased sharply to 54.5 percent, and there was a significant reduction in the quality and quantity of jobs. Since the transition, the only sector creating substantial numbers of salaried jobs in Afghanistan are jobs related to security services. While it is difficult to pin down the role of the deteriorating security situation on welfare, there is no doubt that increasing violence and insecurity have contributed to dampening economic growth, and directly affected livelihoods and income earning opportunities for many Afghans.
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Around the world, countries use a wide variety of poverty measurement methodologies. A common method used to measure poverty is based on levels of consumption - a person is considered poor if his or her consumption level falls below some minimum level necessary to meet basic needs.
... See More + This note therefore aims at briefly laying out the methodological framework of measuring poverty in the Maldives using a relative poverty line and presents findings of applying the poverty concepts in the context of the Maldives. For the purpose of this note, poverty is the pronounced deprivation in well-being defined as whether households or individuals have enough resources or abilities to meet their needs. Poverty is also multidimensional in nature and can include low incomes and the inability to acquire the basic goods and services necessary for survival with dignity but also low levels of health and education, poor access to clean water and sanitation, inadequate physical security, lack of voice, and insufficient capacity and opportunity to better one’s life.
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Afghans represent the world’s largest protracted refugee population, and one of the largest populations to be repatriated to their country of origin in this century.
... See More + Between 2002 and 2016, over six million refugees returned to Afghanistan from neighboring countries. In 2016 alone, returnees numbered more than a million. In an already difficult context, large-scale internal displacement and return from outside have strained the delivery of public services in Afghanistan and increased competition for scarce economic opportunities, not only for the displaced, but for the population at large. This note aims at contributing to our understanding of displacement in Afghanistan by comparing the socioeconomic profiles of three populations: (i) former refugees who returned to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2014 (“pre-2015 returnees”); (ii) internally displaced persons (“IDPs”); and (iii) non-displaced persons (“hosts”). The note captures and compares these groups’ situations at a specific time-point, using data from the 2013-14 Afghanistan Living Conditions Survey (ALCS). Importantly, the results document socioeconomic conditions just prior to the transfer of security responsibilities from international troops to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) in 2014, which was associated with a subsequent decline in aid, both security and civilian, and a sharp drop in economic activity. The results presented here cover the largest return of Afghans to the county following the fall of the Taliban in 2002, but precede the more recent large-scale return of Afghan refugees from Pakistan in 2016-17. Future publications will extend the findings summarized here with analysis of new and existing data covering this recent influx. This research is part of an ongoing effort to document population displacement challenges and solutions in Afghanistan over time. Data from ALCS 2013-14 establish baseline socio-economic profiles for returned refugees, IDPs, and non-displaced hosts. Further research and analysis now in progress will document how these conditions have changed since 2013-14, and will distill evidence for policy to improve socio-economic outcomes among Afghanistan’s displaced and non-displaced people.
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The Maldives national bureau of statistics (NBS) undertook a household income and expenditure survey (HIES) in 2016. The latest round of HIES in the Maldives (with other rounds conducted in 2003 and 2009-10) was undertaken by NBS with a completely revised survey and questionnaire design which includes important survey improvements to bring the HIES up to international standards, particularly in the measurement of poverty, but also hinders comparability with past survey years.
... See More + The analysis was undertaken in various steps which included the processing of the raw dataset and data validation. This document focuses on the detailed description of the methodology in the Maldives which was applied to derive poverty estimates, including a discussion on data challenges. In particular, this document is organized as follows: section one gives introduction. Section two describes the processing of raw datasets and data validation. Section three displays the four components of the nominal consumption aggregate - expenditure on food, non-food non-durables, consumer flows from durable goods, and rent. Section four discusses temporal and spatial adjustments to construct a real consumption aggregate and section five provides an overview of data challenges. Section six discusses the construction of relative poverty lines and section seven concludes.
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The official poverty line for Afghanistan was set in 2007-08, using information available from the national risk and vulnerability assessment (NRVA) survey.
... See More + Adhering to international best practice, the poverty line was set following the cost of basic needs (CBN) approach. The CBN method represents the level of per-capita consumption at which the members of a household can be expected to meet their basic needs in terms of both food and non-food consumption. The measurement of poverty based on the ALCS 2016-17 is obtained by updating the poverty line set using the NRVA 2007-08. More specifically, the CBN approach defines a consumption bundle deemed to be adequate for meeting basic consumption needs and estimates the cost of acquiring this bundle. The consumption bundle includes goods that a person consumes (i) to be adequately nourished, and (ii) to fully participate in the society he and she lives in. The food component of the poverty line is anchored to a caloric requirement for maintaining body weight and sustaining activity levels, consistent with local food tastes and consumption patterns. In addition, a non-food component is added, consistent with the spending patterns of the poor. Together they provide an estimate for an absolute poverty line-explicitly fixed at a specific level of welfare—allowing for poverty comparisons across individuals. Updating the original poverty line, as opposed to setting a new one, preserves the comparability of poverty estimates over time, thereby allowing an analysis of changes in poverty. In particular, to allow for comparisons between the three survey years for which data on welfare are available (NRVA 2007-08, NRVA 2011-12, and ALCS 2016-171), the measure of welfare used to rank households (that is, the consumption aggregate) should be constructed following the same methodology used for the baseline year. This ensures that the updated poverty line captures the same level of wellbeing identified by the original poverty line but is evaluated at the prices obtained from the current survey.
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In early 2017, as Afghanistan witnessed the largest influx of refugee returns in recent years, little was known about the location patterns and needs of the more than 2 million Afghan returnees who had come back since 2015.
... See More + Separate agencies managed registration databases for different groups, and the lack of access to SIM cards (due to the lack of necessary documentation) severely limited the broad applicability of findings from phone monitoring surveys. At the same time, existing data sources had not been fully exploited to characterize different groups of displaced populations, nor had attempts been made to link them to data collected by humanitarian agencies. The main purpose of collecting information on returnees was to assist the design and targeting of development programs for recent and future returnees. The note will start by discussing the details of how survey participants were identified using a combination of Random Digit Dialing (RDD) and Interactive voice response (IVR) and respondent driven sampling (RDS). Section 3 will present the survey design, implementation and response rates. Section 4 discusses the implications of the sampling methods and section 5 analyzes the representativeness of the collected data. Section Error! Reference source not found. discusses the use of sampling weights to adjust for sampling bias and finally, section 7 summarizes up the lessons learned.
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Afghanistan’s security environment is continuing to deteriorate. The increased conflict appears to be holding back business and consumer confidence from recovering fully from the impact of the security transition in 2014.
... See More + Economic growth has increased moderately from 2014-15, when the lowest growth rate was recorded since 2003. Proxy data for the first half of 2017 indicates that economic activity is continuing to languish, while business sentiment, gauged from the quarterly business perception surveys, appears to have improved slightly between the first and second quarters of 2017, though it remains lower than in the second quarter of 2016. The annual economic growth rate is projected to reach 2.6 percent in 2017, increasing very slightly from the figure of 2.2 percent recorded in 2016. Growth is projected to edge up to 3.2 percent in 2018, assuming no further deterioration in the security environment. While this constitutes a moderate improvement compared to 2014 and 2015, it is still significantly below the 9.6 percent average annual rate recorded in the period from 2003 to 2012.
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Over the past 30 years, Maldives has successfully built on its extraordinary natural assets to promote growth and socio-economic development. Maldives shares many of the Small Island Developing States development challenges, such as: a small domestic market; a narrow and fragile resource base; a shortage of skilled manpower; difficult inter-island transport and communication; high cost of social and economic infrastructure provision; and heavy dependence on external trade and vulnerability to external shocks and natural disasters.
... See More + However, in the case of Maldives, these challenges are compounded by its high geographic dispersion of 199 inhabited islands grouped in 26 atolls with a local population of 344,0003, spread over roughly 90,000 square kilometers. Maldives’ unique archipelagic coral island provides the country with an extremely rich and diverse marine ecological system. With more territorial sea than land, marine resources have played a vital role shaping the contours of economic development, with nature-based tourism being the key driver of economic growth (tourism accounts for about a third of the country’s GDP) and fisheries an important sector of employment for the local population (World Bank, 2015). The Maldivian labor market encounters important challenges in productively employing a better educated young labor force. Even though Maldives has sustained high levels of growth and labor market conditions have improved slightly over time, with an increase in labor market participation and employment, important challenges for the Maldivian labor market remain. These challenges are: (i) a stronger labor market inclusion and productive employment for youth; and (ii) important sectors for growth and employment generation are reliant on foreign labor and do not provide opportunities for women. This note attempts to unpack the challenges young Maldivians face in the labor market and to investigate constraints and opportunities for job creation in the tourism and fisheries sectors.
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A severe slow-down in Afghanistan's economic growth characterized the period between 2012 and 2014, the so called Transition period leading to the 2014 election and handover of security responsibility to Afghan forces.
... See More + Afghanistan's economic malaise during this time can be attributed to the combined effects of the drawdown of international military forces and a sharp fall in associated international spending, reduction of aid, and increasing conflict and political instability. While aid fueled strong growth during the pre-transition period between 2007-2008 and 2011-2012, worrisome socio-economic dynamics already present intensified during the transition. Notably, the transition crisis magnified once again the many inequalities-between regions, cities and rural areas, rich and poor Afghans, and between men and women and girls and boys-that fracture Afghan society. The poorest and most vulnerable segments of the population benefited least from pre-transition growth, and the same groups suffered the most once the economy and the security condition deteriorated. This new edition of the Poverty Status Update series documents the evolution of poverty and socio-economic inclusion during the transition. It examines determinants of poverty and, with an eye beyond 2014, suggests policies to reduce vulnerability and inequalities.
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A severe slow-down in Afghanistan's economic growth characterized the period between 2012 and 2014, the so called Transition period leading to the 2014 election and handover of security responsibility to Afghan forces.
... See More + Afghanistan's economic malaise during this time can be attributed to the combined effects of the drawdown of international military forces and a sharp fall in associated international spending, reduction of aid, and increasing conflict and political instability. While aid fueled strong growth during the pre-transition period between 2007-2008 and 2011-2012, worrisome socio-economic dynamics already present intensified during the transition. Notably, the transition crisis magnified once again the many inequalities-between regions, cities and rural areas, rich and poor Afghans, and between men and women and girls and boys-that fracture Afghan society. The poorest and most vulnerable segments of the population benefited least from pre-transition growth, and the same groups suffered the most once the economy and the security condition deteriorated. This new edition of the Poverty Status Update series documents the evolution of poverty and socio-economic inclusion during the transition. It examines determinants of poverty and, with an eye beyond 2014, suggests policies to reduce vulnerability and inequalities.
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The Afghanistan Development Update, which is published twice a year, provides a comprehensive report of the state of the Afghan economy. It covers recent economic developments and outlines the medium-term outlook for Afghanistan.
... See More + Afghanistan. Each edition includes a section that provides in-depth analysis on one or more specific focus topics. The lack of high-frequency data in Afghanistan makes it difficult to track economic activities on a monthly or quarterly basis. Thus, proxy indicators are utilized when their quality is deemed satisfactory. Efforts are made to ensure that key analysis and forecasts are based primarily on reliable sets of data. The Afghanistan Development Update is intended for a wide audience, including policy makers, the donor community, the private sector, the community of analysts and professionals engaged in monitoring the economy and Afghanistan’s citizens at large. In this issue of the Update, the Focus Section discusses how economic stimulus can be provided in Afghanistan’s resource-constrained environment. In the context of the economic slowdown, Afghanistan faces the difficult dilemma of balancing measures to stimulate the economy while at the same time avoiding a further weakening of its fiscal position. The fiscal space is already extremely limited, with no room to increase public expenditure or to lower taxes. Thus, the Government must implement initiatives to maximize the growth impact of fiscal expenditure. First, policies to encourage government spending on non-tradable goods from local suppliers will ensure that demand taps domestic production, rather than imports. Second, policies to improve absorptive capacity will increase the quality, speed of execution and value for money of public investments. Third, policies to promote contestable markets in banking and construction will stimulate the entry of small and medium-sized firms in both sectors. Fourth, polices to increase fiscal space should include measures to improve revenue mobilization and to use existing resources more effectively, which will release additional resources.
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The Afghanistan Development Update, which is published twice a year, provides a comprehensive report of the state of the Afghan economy. It covers recent economic developments and outlines the medium-term outlook for Afghanistan.
... See More + Afghanistan. Each edition includes a section that provides in-depth analysis on one or more specific focus topics. The lack of high-frequency data in Afghanistan makes it difficult to track economic activities on a monthly or quarterly basis. Thus, proxy indicators are utilized when their quality is deemed satisfactory. Efforts are made to ensure that key analysis and forecasts are based primarily on reliable sets of data. The Afghanistan Development Update is intended for a wide audience, including policy makers, the donor community, the private sector, the community of analysts and professionals engaged in monitoring the economy and Afghanistan’s citizens at large. In this issue of the Update, the Focus Section discusses how economic stimulus can be provided in Afghanistan’s resource-constrained environment. In the context of the economic slowdown, Afghanistan faces the difficult dilemma of balancing measures to stimulate the economy while at the same time avoiding a further weakening of its fiscal position. The fiscal space is already extremely limited, with no room to increase public expenditure or to lower taxes. Thus, the Government must implement initiatives to maximize the growth impact of fiscal expenditure. First, policies to encourage government spending on non-tradable goods from local suppliers will ensure that demand taps domestic production, rather than imports. Second, policies to improve absorptive capacity will increase the quality, speed of execution and value for money of public investments. Third, policies to promote contestable markets in banking and construction will stimulate the entry of small and medium-sized firms in both sectors. Fourth, polices to increase fiscal space should include measures to improve revenue mobilization and to use existing resources more effectively, which will release additional resources.
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The Afghanistan Development Update, which is published twice a year, provides a comprehensive report of the state of the Afghan economy. It covers recent economic developments and outlines the medium-term outlook for Afghanistan.
... See More + Afghanistan. Each edition includes a section that provides in-depth analysis on one or more specific focus topics. The lack of high-frequency data in Afghanistan makes it difficult to track economic activities on a monthly or quarterly basis. Thus, proxy indicators are utilized when their quality is deemed satisfactory. Efforts are made to ensure that key analysis and forecasts are based primarily on reliable sets of data. The Afghanistan Development Update is intended for a wide audience, including policy makers, the donor community, the private sector, the community of analysts and professionals engaged in monitoring the economy and Afghanistan’s citizens at large. In this issue of the Update, the Focus Section discusses how economic stimulus can be provided in Afghanistan’s resource-constrained environment. In the context of the economic slowdown, Afghanistan faces the difficult dilemma of balancing measures to stimulate the economy while at the same time avoiding a further weakening of its fiscal position. The fiscal space is already extremely limited, with no room to increase public expenditure or to lower taxes. Thus, the Government must implement initiatives to maximize the growth impact of fiscal expenditure. First, policies to encourage government spending on non-tradable goods from local suppliers will ensure that demand taps domestic production, rather than imports. Second, policies to improve absorptive capacity will increase the quality, speed of execution and value for money of public investments. Third, policies to promote contestable markets in banking and construction will stimulate the entry of small and medium-sized firms in both sectors. Fourth, polices to increase fiscal space should include measures to improve revenue mobilization and to use existing resources more effectively, which will release additional resources.
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A severe slow-down in Afghanistan's economic growth characterized the period between 2012 and 2014, the so called Transition period leading to the 2014 election and handover of security responsibility to Afghan forces.
... See More + Afghanistan's economic malaise during this time can be attributed to the combined effects of the drawdown of international military forces and a sharp fall in associated international spending, reduction of aid, and increasing conflict and political instability. While aid fueled strong growth during the pre-transition period between 2007-2008 and 2011-2012, worrisome socio-economic dynamics already present intensified during the transition. Notably, the transition crisis magnified once again the many inequalities-between regions, cities and rural areas, rich and poor Afghans, and between men and women and girls and boys-that fracture Afghan society. The poorest and most vulnerable segments of the population benefited least from pre-transition growth, and the same groups suffered the most once the economy and the security condition deteriorated. This new edition of the Poverty Status Update series documents the evolution of poverty and socio-economic inclusion during the transition. It examines determinants of poverty and, with an eye beyond 2014, suggests policies to reduce vulnerability and inequalities.
See Less -
A severe slow-down in Afghanistan's economic growth characterized the period between 2012 and 2014, the so called Transition period leading to the 2014 election and handover of security responsibility to Afghan forces.
... See More + Afghanistan's economic malaise during this time can be attributed to the combined effects of the drawdown of international military forces and a sharp fall in associated international spending, reduction of aid, and increasing conflict and political instability. While aid fueled strong growth during the pre-transition period between 2007-2008 and 2011-2012, worrisome socio-economic dynamics already present intensified during the transition. Notably, the transition crisis magnified once again the many inequalities-between regions, cities and rural areas, rich and poor Afghans, and between men and women and girls and boys-that fracture Afghan society. The poorest and most vulnerable segments of the population benefited least from pre-transition growth, and the same groups suffered the most once the economy and the security condition deteriorated. This new edition of the Poverty Status Update series documents the evolution of poverty and socio-economic inclusion during the transition. It examines determinants of poverty and, with an eye beyond 2014, suggests policies to reduce vulnerability and inequalities.
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