Women

Dr. Dean Karlan, Dr. Nava Ashrad, and Dr. Wesley Yin conducted an experiment in Philippines, where they offered commitment savings products to a subset of 710 randomly selected clients of a Phillipine bank. Since after 12 months the average savings balances increased, this study demonstrated that commitment savings products can result in lasting change in savings beyond the initial, positive short-term response to the new product.

Negotiating your way out of poverty is like a life-long or even intergenerational challenge, where any small movement out of poverty can be undone by an illness in the family or a natural disaster. Many of the tools of pro-poor economic growth are meant to help prevent a family from going down, soften the blow from setbacks or even provide ways out of poverty.

Ultra-poor households, however, are usually incapable of even meeting life’s basic necessities – they lack productive assets of any kind and are too vulnerable to gainfully participate in markets.

Three leading practitioners and thought leaders highlight lessons learned from innovative practices and research that support ultra-poor households in transitioning from meeting basic needs (especially food security) towards economic self-reliance. These examples show that sequenced interventions can put the poorest on sustainable pathways out of extreme poverty.

A perfect storm of factors converged in late 2007 to create upward pressure on global food prices which took much of the world by surprise and which negatively impacted billions of people already living precariously. The food price crisis particularly affected populations who were already food insecure and dependent on resource transfer programs as well as those living ‘on the edge’ and vulnerable to slight shocks to their fragile livelihoods.

This summary report documents some of the ways different countries have tried to mitigate the effects of the food crisis in the short term. In the longer term, the MENA countries will need to find ways to coordinate an overall food security strategy able to address many of the structural difficulties the regions faces, such as critical water shortage and inefficient agriculture.