Transfer programs have been shown to reduce intimate partner violence (IPV), but little evidence exists on how activities linked to transfers affect IPV or what happens when programs end. We assess postprogram impacts on IPV of randomly assigning women in Bangladesh to receive cash or food, with or without nutrition behavior change communication (BCC). Six to 10 months postprogram, IPV did not differ between women receiving transfers and a control group; however, women receiving transfers with BCC experienced 26 percent less physical violence. Evidence on mechanisms suggests sustained effects of BCC on women’s threat points, men’s social costs of violence, and household well-being.

Gender considerations in the design and delivery of social protection programs are critical to meet overall objectives of reducing poverty and vulnerability. We provide an overview of the policy discourse and research on social protection and gender in low- and middle-income countries, focusing on social assistance, social care, and social insurance. Taking a ‘review of reviews’ approach, we aggregate findings from rigorous evaluations on women's health, economic, empowerment, and violence impacts. We show there is robust evidence that social assistance has beneficial effects across all four domains. In addition, there is emerging evidence that social care has positive impacts on women’s economic outcomes, but scarce evidence of its impacts on other domains. Aggregated evidence on the impacts of social insurance are lacking. Key design elements facilitating positive impacts for women relate to gender targeting; quality complementary programming; replacing conditionalities with soft nudges; ensuring the value, frequency, and duration of benefits are sufficient; and gender-sensitive operational components. We close with a discussion of evidence gaps and priorities for future research.

While indirect methods are increasingly widely used to measure sensitive behaviors such as intimate partner violence in order to minimize social desirability biases in responses, in developing countries the use of more complex indirect questioning methods raises important questions around how individuals will react to the use of a more unusual and complex question structure. This paper presents evidence from a list experiment measuring multiple forms of intimate partner violence within an extremely poor sample of women in rural Ethiopia. We find that the list experiment does not generate estimates of intimate partner violence that are higher than direct response questions; rather, prevalence estimates using the list experiment are lower vis-à-vis prevalence estimates using the direct reports, and sometimes even negative. We interpret this finding as consistent with “fleeing” behavior by respondents who do not wish to be associated with statements associated with intimate partner violence.

Social protection programs are primarily focused on influencing household behavior in the short term, increasing consumption to reduce poverty and food insecurity, and promoting investments in human capital. A large body of evidence across numerous settings shows that cash and food transfer programs are highly effective in doing so. However, there is growing interest in understanding the extent to which such programs can help households stay out of poverty in the longer term, specifically after transfers end. We bring new evidence to this question, re-interviewing Bangladeshi households that participated in a well-implemented randomized social protection intervention four years after it ended. We find that combining transfers, either cash or food, with behavior change communication activities sustainably reduced poverty. Cash transfers alone had sustainable effects, but these were context-specific. The beneficial impacts of food transfers did not persist four years after the intervention finished.

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a global public health crisis and human rights violation, with adverse consequences for women and girls, economies as a whole, and future generations. Existing multicountry evidence suggests that the high prevalence of VAWG in low- and middle-income countries could be holding back advances in many priority areas — such as education (Gennari et al. 2014), health (Ellsberg et al. 2008), nutrition (Yount et al. 2011), adaptation to climate change (Le Masson et al. 2019), and adoption of sustainable livelihoods (Morrison and Orlando 2004). In the context of agricultural development, VAWG can reduce agency (Theis et al. 2018) — preventing women from seeking control over assets and income (instrumental agency), participating in groups (collective agency), and building self-worth (intrinsic agency). In addition, fear of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence in public spaces can induce girls or women to choose lower quality educational outcomes (Borker 2021), limit their opportunities for safe and decent work (Nordehn 2018), and depress their labor market participation (Chakraborty et al. 2018, Siddique 2021).

As social protection programs and systems adapt to mitigate against the COVID-19 crisis, gender considerations are likely to be overlooked in an urgent effort to save lives and provide critical economic support. Yet, past research and learning indicates that small adaptations to make program design and implementation more gender-sensitive may result in overall and equality-related gains. We summarize some of these considerations for LMICs across five areas: 1) Adapting existing schemes and social protection modality choice, 2) targeting, 3) benefit level and frequency, 4) delivery mechanisms and operational features, and 5) complementary programming. It is our hope that COVID-19 will be an opportunity to address, and not exacerbate, pre-existing gender inequalities and lay the groundwork for more gender-sensitive social protection programming in LMICs beyond the crisis, building toward the wellbeing of societies as a whole.

Despite falling rates of poverty and child undernutrition in Africa over the last two decades, the absolute number of people living in poverty and the absolute number of undernourished children continue to rise due to population growth (Beegle et al., 2018; Black et al., 2013). Global evidence suggests that cash transfer programs can reduce poverty and food insecurity and can build resilience for the poor. When cash transfer programs are com-bined with nutrition interventions, they also have the potential to accelerate improvements in child nutrition, especially when targeted to the critical window of opportunity for nutrition, the first one thousand days of a child’s life (Ruel et al., 2013). In West Africa, many cash transfer programs are combined with accompanying measures such as promotion sessions that aim to improve knowledge and increase adoption of recommended behaviors—including those related to child nutrition (Beegle et al., 2018, see Box 1). However, the extent to which such multi-component programs lead to changes in behavior and improve-ments in outcomes related to children’s nutrition and health is still not well-understood.

Evidence shows transfer programs can improve early childhood development (ECD). However, knowledge gaps remain on how short-term impacts on ECD evolve as children grow older, how program design features and context affect child development impacts over time, and through what pathways such impacts occur. We study the Transfer Modality Research Initiative (TMRI), a 2-year randomized controlled trial in two regions of Bangladesh that provided cash or food transfers, with or without complementary nutrition programming, to mothers of children aged 0-2 years at baseline. Drawing on data collected at 6 months post-program (when children were about 2-4 years old) and at 4 years post-program (when children were about 6-8 years old), we assess post-program impacts of TMRI on children’s home environment and development. We find strong post-program impacts on the home environment from cash transfers in the Northern region, particularly when combined with complementary programming, however limited

Weather shocks can affect men and women differently, due in part to differences in their adaptive capacities. We merge weather data with survey data from a randomized control trial of a cash transfer program in Mali to describe how men and women cope with weather shocks and the role of cash transfer programs in supporting adaptive responses. We find that heavy rainfall reduces household’s consumption but that the cash transfer program mitigates these impacts, primarily by allowing households to draw down both men’s and women’s savings, increasing the value of livestock and farming assets held jointly by men and women, and facilitating a reallocation of men’s and women’s labor to livestock production and women’s labor to domestic work.