Households in developing countries use a variety of mechanisms to cope with shocks, such as selling assets, accessing capital markets, reallocating labor, and receiving private or public transfers. Among these responses, selling assets is often a last resort because irreversible asset losses may put the household at risk of future poverty. This policy note summarizes research focusing on the extent to which various kinds of adverse events (that is, shocks) affect men’s and women’s behavior in relation to asset accumulation and divestiture and whether the different types of shocks result in men’s and women’s changing their stock of assets in different ways.

Investments in social assistance programs (SAPs) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are increasing. As investments increase, the objectives of these programs are expanding from focusing on reducing poverty to addressing other social issues such as improving diets and nutrition. At the same time, there is increasing interest in addressing all forms of malnutrition within the framework of food systems. Given the intersections between SAPs and food systems, we reviewed the effectiveness of SAPs (agriculture asset transfers, cash transfers, in-kind transfers, vouchers, public works and school meals programs) for reducing all forms of malnutrition across the lifecycle within a food systems framework. As several programs included multiple treatment arms, each representing a unique program design, we used study arm as the unit of analysis and assessed the proportion of study arms with positive or negative program impacts on diet and nutrition outcomes among men, women and children. The majority of the studies included in this review were from evaluations of agriculture asset, cash and in-kind transfer programs. There was clear evidence of positive impacts on women’s and children’s diet-related outcomes. Very few studies assessed program impact on women’s nutritional status outcomes. However, there was some evidence of impacts on increasing body mass index and hemoglobin concentration (Hb) with in-kind transfer programs. Among children, several study arms across the agriculture asset, cash and in-kind transfer programs found positive impacts on increasing height-for-age Z-score (33%-45% of study arms) and weight-for-height Z-score (33%-50% of study arms) and decreasing the prevalence of wasting (43%-60% of study arms). Cash and in-kind transfer programs also found positive effects on reducing stunting prevalence in 33% and 45% of study arms, respectively. Lastly, a few study arms assessed program impact on increasing Hb with some evidence of positive impacts in in-kind and school feeding programs. There was a paucity of relevant evidence of the effectiveness of voucher and public works programs on diet and nutrition outcomes, for men’s outcomes and on micronutrient status. Several challenges remain in understanding the potential for SAPs to improve diet and nutrition outcomes within food systems including the heterogeneity of program and evaluation designs, populations targeted by the programs and included in evaluations and indicators used to assess impact. Addressing these challenges in future evaluations is important for informing program and policy actions to improve the effectiveness of SAPs within food systems for improving diet and nutrition outcomes across the lifecycle.

There is growing evidence that gender disparities in the distribution of paid and unpaid work impose constraints on women’s well-being and livelihoods, reducing access to paid employment, and time for education, leisure, and social activities. Yet, gender disparities in unpaid work often go undiagnosed by traditional household surveys. While time-use surveys are well-suited for measuring unpaid work, they are often expensive to administer and take substantial amounts of survey time, leading to respondent fatigue, particularly in multi-topic surveys where other outcomes are also being collected. In this paper, we compare data collected using the task allocation module in the Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia (TAFSSA) integrated household survey and the time-use module in the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) survey. We begin by describing the methods used to collect the data in each of the surveys. We present an overview of the characteristics of the study sites in the TAFSSA integrated survey and sites in the same countries where the WEAI data were collected. We then present comparable data from each of the two methods. The findings confirm the gendered patterns in involvement in different activities as measured by both survey modules. While women’s participation in agricultural activities is high across Bangladesh, India, and Nepal, the amount of time they spend on agricultural activities is less than that spent by men. Both survey tools confirm that women undertake most of the food preparation-related activities, and men contribute through shopping/purchasing food.

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.

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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.

It is widely acknowledged that unmitigated risks provide a disincentive for otherwise optimal investments in modern farm inputs. Index insurance provides a means for managing risk without the burdens of asymmetric information and high transaction costs that plague traditional indemnity-based crop insurance programs. Yet many index insurance programs that have been piloted around the world have met with rather limited success, so the potential for insurance to foster more intensive agricultural production has yet to be realized. This study assesses both the demand for and the effectiveness of an innovative index insurance product designed to help smallholder farmers in Bangladesh manage risk to crop yields and the increased production costs associated with drought. Villages were randomized into either an insurance treatment or a comparison group, and discounts and rebates were randomly allocated across treatment villages to encourage insurance take-up and to allow for the estimation of the price elasticity of insurance demand. Among those offered insurance, we find insurance demand to be moderately price elastic, with discounts significantly more successful in stimulating demand than rebates. Farmers who are highly risk averse or sensitive to basis risk prefer a rebate to a discount, suggesting that the rebate may partially offset some of the implicit costs associated with insurance contract nonperformance. Having insurance yields both ex ante risk management effects and ex post income effects on agricultural input use. The risk management effects lead to increased expenditures on inputs during the aman rice-growing season, including expenditures for risky inputs such as fertilizers, as well as those for irrigation and pesticides. The income effects lead to increased seed expenditures during the boro rice-growing season, which may signal insured farmers’ higher rates of seed replacement, which broadens their access to technological improvements embodied in newer seeds as well as enhancing the genetic purity of cultivated seeds.

This brief attempts to unpack the relationship between gender and resilience by reviewing the evidence on men’s and women’s differential exposure to risk and the differential impact of shocks on men and women, and by examining the different types of mechanisms that men and women use to cope with and insure against risk. In reviewing these mechanisms, we assess whether they contribute to building resilience and we suggest gender-sensitive insurance mechanisms that will allow men and women alike to manage and cope with risk and vulnerability.

Home to one-quarter of humanity—one-fifth of whom are youth—South Asia has the world’s largest concentration of poverty and malnutrition (1–3). Despite producing one-quarter of the world’s consumed food, the region’s agrifood systems face formidable challenges in producing an adequate and affordable supply of the diverse foods needed for sustainable healthy diets (4,5). Unhealthy food consumption is rising, and farming systems are threatened by unsustainable groundwater withdrawal due to poorly developed food and energy policies. In addition, South Asia’s farmers are both contributors and victims of climate change and extreme weather, which contributes to rural out-migration—particularly of youth—resulting in rising labor scarcity and increased production costs. TAFSSA (Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia), a CGIAR Regional Integrated Initiative, aims to address these challenges by delivering actionable evidence and scalable innovations across these regions through a coordinated program of research and engagement from farmer to consumer. One of the roadblocks to addressing these challenges is the lack of credible and high-resolution data on food systems in the region. The TAFSSA food systems assessment aims to provide a reliable, accessible and integrated evidence base that links farm production, market access, dietary patterns, climate risk responses, and natural resource management in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan. It is intended to be a multi-year assessment.

Fruit and vegetable (F&V) production is growing rapidly across Tanzania, particularly among rural smallholder farmers. Increased F&V production could help improve diets within these communities and beyond. However, farmers face barriers in increasing production due to lack of access to key agricultural inputs including seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation, among others. Farmers also require financing to access these inputs as well as extension services to increase training and use of these agricultural practices. In response to these needs, the FRESH end-to end approach implemented in two regions in Northern Tanzania aims to increase the desirability, affordability, accessibility, and availability of F&V through interventions at various points of the food system, including demand creation, food environments and supply (production and post-harvest management). More information on the FRESH end-to-end approach and evaluation can be found in the FRESH Research Brief 1. The effectiveness of the FRESH end-to-end approach in improving vegetable production and F&V intake is being assessed through an impact evaluation conducted in 33 villages across 5 districts in the Arusha and Kilimanjaro regions of Northern Tanzania. In this research brief, we describe findings on the baseline characteristics of the villages included in the evaluation with a specific emphasis on agricultural inputs, F&V storage and processing facilities, and other relevant agricultural characteristics. We explore these characteristics for the full sample of 33 villages, as well as at the district and regional levels.