During the 1990's a number of countries in Latin America including Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, developed policies focused on utility sector liberalization through increased private sector participation. This focus resulted from the recognition that overall quality and availability of services were inadequate. Infrastructure reform is inexorably linked to poverty alleviation and therefore must be carefully constructed and enacted. This book provides practical guidelines and options for infrastructure reform that result in access and affordability for the poor. Accounting for Poverty in...

This title examines the links between gender, time use, and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. It contributes to a broader definition of poverty to include 'time poverty', and to a broader definition of work to include household work. The papers present a conceptual framework linking both market and household work, review some of the available literature and surveys on time use in Africa, and use tools and approaches drawn from analysis of consumption-based poverty to develop the concept of a time poverty line and to examine linkages between time poverty, consumption poverty and other dimensions...

Relying on contributions from the International Movement ATD Fourth World, this book deals with questions such as: What does it mean to live in poverty, and especially in extreme poverty? How can very poor people be reached through development projects? How can we assess whether projects succeed in changing the lives of the poorest individuals? In answering these questions, the emphasis is on exploring what type of knowledge is needed to fight extreme poverty. A key argument is that apart from academic knowledge, a concerted effort is needed to listen to the knowledge of poor people...

This volume provides a set of six case studies from West Africa. These assess the benefits of growth (or the costs of a lack of growth) in terms of poverty reduction in those countries. The first part of this book describes the experience of two countries (Ghana and Senegal) that achieved high levels of growth in the 1990s, and that also experienced important reductions in poverty, even though growth was not strictly pro-poor. The second part describes the experience of two other countries (Burkina Faso and Cape Verde) that also achieved high levels of growth in the 1990s, but where there was...

While public-private partnerships in education in the United States have received a lot of attention, research on such partnerships elsewhere has been limited--even though such partnerships have been steadily gaining prominence, particularly in developing countries. Aiming to fill this gap, this book presents fresh, technically sound empirical evidence on the effectiveness and cost of various public-private education partnerships from around the world, including voucher programs and faith-based schools. The evidence on the impact in terms of school performance, targeting, and cost of...

Women's earnings are a fraction of male's earnings in several African countries. It is tempting to conclude that this wage gap is a sign of discrimination against women in the labor market. Yet this book uses new datasets to show that the gap is not simply the result of discrimination in the labor markets, but rather the result of multiple factors, including access to education and credit, cultural values and household duties, and, above all, labor market conditions. It shows that gender disparities grow when economies are not functioning well and labor markets are tiny. More than the effect...

La mayoria de los observadores consideran que Fe y Alegria es una organizacion exitosa, pero pocas evaluaciones de caracter riguroso se han realizado hasta el momento. Las contribuciones a este volumen estan dedicadas a la evaluacion del desempeno y de algunos aspectos de la gestion y las practicas pedagogicas de la federacion Fe y Alegria, un movimiento impulsado por la Compania de Jesus que presta servicios a aproximadamente un millon de personas en 20 paises, en su mayoria en America Latina. La evidencia cuantitativa disponible sugiere que las escuelas de la federacion frecuentemente...

This volume is devoted to an assessment of the performance and selected aspects of the management and pedagogical practices of Fe y Alegria, a federation of Jesuit schools serving approximately one million children in 20 countries, mostly in Latin America. Many observers consider Fe y Alegria a successful organization, but very few rigorous evaluations have been conducted. The available quantitative evidence suggests that the federation's schools often do reach the poor, and that students in Fe y Alegria schools tend to perform as well on test scores, if not slightly better, than comparable...

Despite substantial progress towards peace, economic growth, and better governance since 2003, Liberia remains one of the poorest countries in the world. The objective of this study is twofold. First it is to provide a basic diagnostic of both consumption-based poverty and human development (especially education and health) in the country using the 2007 CWIQ (Core Welfare Indicators Questionnaire) survey. Second, it is to assess the likely impact on the poor of the recent economic crisis, and especially the increase in rice prices, and to document the targeting performance of various measures...

This study provides a diagnostic of the benefit incidence and targeting performance of a large number of social programs in Ghana. Both broad-based programs (such as spending for education and health, and subsidies for food, oil-related products and electricity) as well as targetd programs (such as LEAP, the indigent exemption under the NHIS, school lunches and uniforms, or fertilizer subsidies) are considered. In addition, the study provides tools and recommendations for better targeting of those programs in the future. The tools include new maps and data sets for geographic targeting...