Social protection programs, common in developing countries, can be wide ranging. Expenditures on social schemes are large, but their effectiveness and ability to act as safety nets against shocks can be limited.
... Exibir mais + This paper devises a tractable empirical framework to explore several hypotheses in social protection schemes in Niger. The analyses document two important results. First, non-poverty status and household consumption expenditures decline remarkably when exposed to extreme shocks, that is, declines between 31 and 48 percentage points and 24,278 and 47,549 CFA, respectively. In response, affected households employ a vector of strategies to deal with realized shocks, ranging from the use of livestock holdings to doing nothing. There is evidence of substitution across the shock-strategy set over time. Engaging in migration as a coping mechanism leads to worse household outcomes. This result can be explained by theories of asymmetric information between migrants and their families, and unfavorable labor market conditions at migrants' destination. Second, social transfers are crucial only in the second quarter of the calendar year. Social assistance provided within the second quarter appear to be effective on average and significantly dampens the impact of shocks on households' consumption and vulnerability. The paper interprets this finding as evidence against the long-standing incentive-hypothesis that providing social assistance is a disincentive for households to engage in possible coping strategies, and makes them more sensitive to external shocks for behavioral reasons. The results have important implications for the design and delivery of social assistance programs.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS8455 MAY 29, 2018
Social protection programs, common in developing countries, can be wide ranging. Expenditures on social schemes are large, but their effectiveness and ability to act as safety nets against shocks can be limited.
... Exibir mais + This paper devises a tractable empirical framework to explore several hypotheses in social protection schemes in Niger. The analyses document two important results: first, non-poverty status and household consumption expenditures decline remarkably when exposed to extreme shocks, that is, declines between 31 and 48 percentage points and 24,278 and 47,549 CFA, respectively. In response, affected households employ a vector of strategies to deal with realized shocks, ranging from the use of livestock holdings to doing nothing. There is evidence of substitution across the shock-strategy set over time. Engaging in migration as a coping mechanism leads to worse household outcomes. This result can be explained by theories of asymmetric information between migrants and their families, and unfavorable labor market conditions at migrants’ destination. Second, social transfers are crucial only in the second quarter of the calendar year. Social assistance provided within the second quarter appear to be effective on average and significantly dampens the impact of shocks on households’ consumption and vulnerability. The paper interprets this finding as evidence against the longstanding incentive-hypothesis that providing social assistance is a disincentive for households to engage in possible coping strategies, and makes them more sensitive to external shocks for behavioral reasons. The results have important implications for the design and delivery of social assistance programs.
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Documento de Trabalho (Série Numerada) 129586 MAY 01, 2018
The methods to select safety net beneficiaries are the subject of frequent policy debates. This paper presents the results from a randomized experiment analyzing how efficiency, legitimacy, and short-term program effectiveness vary across widely used targeting methods.
... Exibir mais + The experiment was embedded in the roll-out of a national cash transfer program in Niger. Eligible villages were randomly assigned to have beneficiary households selected through community-based targeting, a proxy-means test, or a formula designed to identify the food-insecure. Proxy-means testing is found to outperform other methods in identifying households with lower consumption per capita. The methods perform similarly against other welfare benchmarks. Legitimacy is high across all methods, but local populations have a slight preference for formula-based approaches. Manipulation and information imperfections are found to affect community-based targeting, although triangulation across multiple selection committees mitigates the related risks. Finally, short-term program impacts on food security are largest among households selected by proxy-means testing. Overall, the differences in performance across targeting methods are small relative to the overall level of exclusion stemming from limited funding for social programs.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS8412 APR 18, 2018
Business enterprises and non-agricultural startups in rural economies play crucial roles in ending the vicious cycle of poverty. The propagation of business enterprises are, however, subject to a high degree of institutional frictions and vacuums e.g., information; but mobile infrastructure which has the externality of flowing information can help overcome most of these vacuums through reduced fixed costs, lower cost of information or search, and outreach to a broader customer base.
... Exibir mais + This paper studies the effects of mobile infrastructure ("mobile use activity") on propagation of rural business enterprises in Niger. Instrumental variable estimates exploit the exogenous introduction of the 2013 national mandatory SIM registration reform which provides a quasi-experimental set-up for mobile use and activity. The mandate deactivated about one-third of all existing prepaid SIMs and led to a remarkable decline in mobile use activity. The results suggest that there is economically substantial effect of mobile infrastructure on propagation of business enterprises. Moving a household with mobile use activity to a no mobile use activity environment due to SIM deactivation results in roughly 33.1 percent points decline in the likelihood of engaging in non-agricultural business enterprises. Most of this effect come from three major sources: households' ownership of a business service or center; ownership of small income generating activities; and involvement in the transformation of agricultural products. There is suggestive evidence that the reform's impact is disproportionately larger for women. With the expansion of mandatory SIM registration reforms in developing countries, the findings have extended implications in these contexts.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS8278 DEC 18, 2017
Business enterprises and non-agricultural startups in rural economies play crucial roles in ending the vicious cycle of poverty. The propagation of business enterprises is, however, subject to a high degree of institutional frictions and vacuums e.g., information; but mobile infrastructure which has the externality of flowing information can help overcome most of these vacuums through reduced fixed costs, lower cost of information or search, and outreach to a broader customer base.
... Exibir mais + This paper studies the effects of mobile infrastructure (‘mobile use activity’) on propagation of rural business enterprises in Niger. Instrumental variable estimates exploit the exogenous introduction of the 2013 national mandatory SIM registration reform which provides a quasi-experimental set-up for mobile use and activity. The mandate deactivated about one-third of all existing prepaid SIMs and led to a remarkable decline in mobile use activity. The results suggest that there is economically substantial effect of mobile infrastructure on propagation of business enterprises. Moving a household with mobile use activity to a no mobile use activity environment due to SIM deactivation results in roughly 33.1 percent points decline in the likelihood of engaging in non-agricultural business enterprises. Most of this effect come from three major sources: households’ ownership of a business service or center; ownership of small income generating activities; and involvement in the transformation of agricultural products. There is suggestive evidence that the reform’s impact is disproportionately larger for women. With the expansion of mandatory SIM registration reforms in developing countries, the findings have extended implications in these contexts.
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Documento de Trabalho (Série Numerada) 125616 DEC 01, 2017
The first 1,000 days of a child's life are critical to healthy development. In poor countries, governments and international development groups are trying to design programs to give families, particularly mothers, the knowledge and services they need so that babies and young children get the healthcare, nutritious foods, and stimulation necessary for the best possible start in life.
... Exibir mais + Delivering these programs isn't easy, especially when extreme poverty, climatic shocks such as droughts, and a lack of basic services often mean families don't have the resources to purchase healthy food or the ability to get adequate healthcare for their children. Experts are looking at twinning cash transfers for the poorest with measures to improve parents' knowledge about what they can do to promote child development. But what does it take to ensure that the messages are effective? And even when women's knowledge improves, does this lead to better child development in countries with weak health and educational services?
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The Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) program aims to document what results are obtained through public spending in the health and education sector.
... Exibir mais + The focus is on the individual dimensions, whether effort (presence and workload) or knowledge (diagnostic accuracy, adherence to clinical guidelines, and case management). These dimensions are not routinely measured and reported publicly in a comparable fashion, yet are among the factors that influence policy outcomes in health. The remainder of this document is organized into three major sections: methodology and implementation; results; and implications for Niger. Annexes present details of the sampling strategy, definitions of the indicators, and additional results. A final section presents the references consulted or cited.
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The Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) program aims to document what results are obtained through public spending in the health and education sector.
... Exibir mais + The focus is on the individual dimensions, whether effort (presence and workload) or knowledge (diagnostic accuracy, adherence to clinical guidelines, and case management). These dimensions are not routinely measured and reported publicly in a comparable fashion, yet are among the factors that influence policy outcomes in health. The remainder of this document is organized into three major sections: methodology and implementation; results; and implications for Niger. Annexes present details of the sampling strategy, definitions of the indicators, and additional results. A final section presents the references consulted or cited.
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Giving power over school management and spending decisions to communities has been a favored strategy to increase school quality, but its effectiveness may depend on local capacity.
... Exibir mais + Grants are one form of such a transfer of power. Short-term responses of a grant to school committees in Niger show that parents increased participation and responsibility, but these efforts did not improve quality on average. Enrollment at the lowest grades increased and school resources improved, but teacher absenteeism increased, and there was no measured impact on test scores. An analysis of heterogeneous impacts and spending decisions provides additional insight into these dynamics. Overall, the findings suggest that programs based on parent participation should take levels of community capacity into account: even when communities are willing to work to improve their schools, they may not be able to do so. The short-term nature of the experiment reduces the extent to which the results can be generalized.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS8125 JUN 27, 2017
This report presents the results of the Service Delivery Indicators in the education sector in Niger in 2015. Survey implementation was preceded by extensive consultation with Government and key stakeholders on survey design, sampling, and adaptation of survey instruments.
... Exibir mais + Pre-testing of the survey instruments took place in 2013, while training of field staff and field work took place in 2015, and data entry, cleaning, and analysis took place in 2016 and 2017. Information was collected from 256 primary schools, 1,748 teachers, and 3,661 grade four and five pupils in Niger. The results provide a representative snapshot of primary education service delivery in Niger. The survey provides information on four elements of service delivery: measures of (i) teacher effort; (ii) teacher knowledge and ability; (iii) the availability of key inputs and infrastructure; and (iv) management, supervision, and community engagement.
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This report presents the results of the Service Delivery Indicators in the education sector in Niger in 2015. Survey implementation was preceded by extensive consultation with Government and key stakeholders on survey design, sampling, and adaptation of survey instruments.
... Exibir mais + Pre-testing of the survey instruments took place in 2013, while training of field staff and field work took place in 2015, and data entry, cleaning, and analysis took place in 2016 and 2017. Information was collected from 256 primary schools, 1,748 teachers, and 3,661 grade four and five pupils in Niger. The results provide a representative snapshot of primary education service delivery in Niger. The survey provides information on four elements of service delivery: measures of (i) teacher effort; (ii) teacher knowledge and ability; (iii) the availability of key inputs and infrastructure; and (iv) management, supervision, and community engagement.
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In Niger, women who marry as children have on average 14-28 percent more births over their life time as compared to women marrying after the age of 18.
... Exibir mais + Controlling for socio-economic and other characteristics, the average number of births per woman would be reduced by 1.10 births or about fifteen percent if child marriage could be eliminated. This in turn would have a substantial effect on demographic growth.
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Poor nutrition weakens children’s immune systems, putting them at a greater risk of falling sick from preventable illnesses such as pneumonia and diarrhea.
... Exibir mais + Research also suggests that poor nutrition at a young age may have irremediable consequences for brain development, cognitive skills, and ultimately productivity in adult life. Unfortunately, a large share of children in the developing world are malnourished. The question considered in this brief is whether early childbirth (defined as a child being born of a mother younger than 18), which in many countries is the result of child marriage, contributes to under-five malnutrition in a significant way in Niger. The brief is part of a series of similar standardized country-specific briefs on the same topic for a number of countries.
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Young mothers often come from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds and early childbirths are more common in poor areas where prenatal care is limited and access to health facilities may be an issue.
... Exibir mais + Girls who have children early also tend to be less educated and may suffer from lack of agency within the household, further reducing access to care. In addition, some girls who give birth early may not yet be ready physiologically to give birth. The risk of obstetric fistula, for example, is higher for young mothers. These various factors lead to higher risks of under-five mortality for children born of young mothers. How large is the impact of early childbirth on under-five mortality? Does early childbirth accounts for a large share of under-five deaths? These are the questions asked in this brief for Niger.
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The Enterprise Surveys (ES) focus on many aspects of the business environment. These factors can be accommodating or constraining for firms and play an important role in whether an economy’s private sector will thrive or not.
... Exibir mais + An accommodating business environment is one that encourages firms to operate efficiently. Such conditions strengthen incentives for firms to innovate and to increase productivity — key factors for sustainable development. A more productive private sector, in turn, expands employment and contributes taxes necessary for public investment in health, education, and other services. The topics include infrastructure, trade, finance, regulations, taxes and business licensing, corruption, crime and informality, access to finance, innovation, labor, and perceptions about obstacles to doing business.The surveys are administered to a representative sample of firms in the non-agricultural, formal, private economy. The ES are repeated approximately every four years for a particular economy (or region). By tracking changes in the business environment, policymakers and researchers can look at the effects of policy and regulatory reforms on firm performance.Repeated surveys aid in studying the evolution of the business environment and how it affects the dynamics of the private sector.This document summarizes the results of the Enterprise Survey for Niger. Business owners and top managers in 151 firms were interviewed between April and June 2017.
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Implementation of the ten-year strategy, that is, the programme décennal de développement du secteur de l’education (PDDE), formulated by the Government of Niger at the beginning of the last decade and covering 2003-2013, has resulted in increased enrollment at all levels of education across the country.
... Exibir mais + Over the last decade, the gross enrollment rate for primary education doubled in Niger going from 36 percent in 2001 to 76 percent in 2011. This significant growth has been supported by increased priority to primary education in the budget, extensive construction and rehabilitation of schools, and recruitment of teachers. However, despite the massive enhancement, enrollment rates are still quite low compared to other countries in the region. The service delivery indicators (SDI) survey was conducted in Niger between October and December 2015. The fieldwork involved collecting information from 256 primary schools, 1,748 teachers, and 3,661 grade four and five pupils. The results provide a representative snapshot of primary education service delivery in Niger.
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Niger’s sharp declines in neonatal and infant mortality since 1960s has raised the nation’s life expectancy at birth from 37 years in 1960 to 58.4 years in 2010 placing the country slightly above the Sub-Saharan Africa average of 54 years.
... Exibir mais + Yet, mortality rates remain high and Niger’s maternal mortality exceeded that of most West African economic and monetary union states in 2010. From October to November 2015 service delivery indicator (SDI) health and education surveys were conducted in Niger to assess the service delivery and the environment in which the services are delivered. In health, 256 facilities, including district hospitals, health centers, and health posts participated in the survey. Information was gathered from 1,355 health providers in public and private and rural and urban settings to give a picture of care in Niger. The objectives of the SDI survey are: (i) to access the quality, effectiveness and productivity of service delivery in frontline services; and (ii) to track the flow of resources and assess the functioning of management, supervision, and governance of service delivery. This technical brief focuses on the first objective.
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This economy profile presents the Doing Business indicators for Niger. To allow useful comparison, it also provides data for other selected economies (comparator economies) for each indicator.
... Exibir mais + Doing Business 2017 is the 14th in a series of annual reports investigating the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. Economies are ranked on their ease of doing business; for 2016 Niger ranks 150. Doing Business sheds light on how easy or difficult it is for a local entrepreneur to open and run a small to medium-size business when complying with relevant regulations. It measures and tracks changes in regulations affecting 11 areas in the life cycle of a business: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, resolving insolvency and labor market regulation. Doing Business 2017 presents the data for the labor market regulation indicators in an annex. The report does not present rankings of economies on labor market regulation indicators or include the topic in the aggregate distance to frontier score or ranking on the ease of doing business. The indicators are used to analyze economic outcomes and identify what reforms have worked, where and why. The data in this report are current as of June 1, 2016 (except for the paying taxes indicators, which cover the period January–December 2015).
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Cash transfer programs have spread rapidly as an instrument to raise household consumption and reduce poverty. Questions remain about the sustainability of cash transfer impacts in low-income settings such as Sub-Saharan Africa and, in particular, on whether cash transfers can foster productive investments in addition to raising immediate consumption among the very poor.
... Exibir mais + This paper presents evidence that a cash transfer project in rural Niger induced investments in assets and productive activities that were sustained among the very poor 18 months after project completion. Results show lasting increases in livestock assets and participation in saving groups (tontines). Cash transfers also contributed to improved agricultural productivity, but no effects in terms of diversification of other household enterprises are found. Productive asset gains are, notably, largest among the poorest of the poor, suggesting that small regular cash transfers combined with enhanced saving mechanisms can relax constraints to asset accumulation among the extreme poor.
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Documento de trabalho sobre pesquisa de políticas WPS7839 SEP 27, 2016
The Country Opinion Survey in Niger assists the World Bank Group (WBG) in gaining a better understanding of how stakeholders in Niger perceive the WBG.
... Exibir mais + It provides the WBG with systematic feedback from national and local governments, multilateral/bilateral agencies, media, academia, the private sector, and civil society in Niger on 1) their views regarding the general environment in Niger; 2) their overall attitudes toward the WBG in Niger; 3) overall impressions of the WBG’s effectiveness and results, knowledge work and activities, and communication and information sharing in Niger; and 4) their perceptions of the WBG’s future role in Niger.
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