About 20,000 early childhood development centers provided day care for and prepared for primary school more than 1 million children aged three to seven (roughly 20 percent of children in that age ...group) in Kenya in 1995. The number of child care facilities reached 23,690 by the end of 1999. The authors analyze the effect of child care costs on households'behavior in Kenya. For households with children aged three to seven, they model household demand for mothers'participation in paid work, the participation in paid work of other household members, household demand for schooling, and household demand for child care. They find that: A) A high cost for child care discourages households from using formal child care facilities and has a negative effect on mothers'participation in market work. B) The cost of child care and the level of mothers'wages affect older children's school enrollment, but these factors affect boys'and girls'schooling differently. An increase in mothers'wages increases boys'enrollment but depresses girls'enrollment. C) Higher child care costs have no significant effect on boys'schooling but significantly decrease the number of girls in school.
Monitoring and evaluation systems are often the least addressed component of project design, and implementation. Yet, such systems have considerable potential for enhancing the impact of projects, ...and the understanding of poverty reduction impacts. This note addresses what makes effective monitoring and evaluation, where both quantitative, and participatory methods are needed to assess a project's impact on poverty. It examines the case of the Uganda Nutrition and Early Childhood Development Project, a process-driven, locally prioritized program, being implemented by a network of nongovernmental organizations, that motivates communities, and provide information to project participants. The project relies on systematic monitoring of inputs and outputs, and, community participation in planning, and monitoring facilitates bottom-up feedback. The note further highlights a randomized experimental design, i.e., a baseline and follow-up surveys, that assess the impact of project activities, of communication and information, and of grassroots management training, and income generation activities for community welfare. The benefits of proactive monitoring and evaluation are that it enables timely inputs into management decision making, and that the quantitative methods used, are important determinants for assessing, and verifying a project's impact.
This report presents the results of a pilot
targeted food price subsidy scheme implemented
in three provinces of the Philippines
for 12 months beginning in mid-1983.
It assesses the economic and ...nutritional effects
of the scheme, analyzes its technical
and administrative feasibility, and considers
possible alternatives.
The scheme consisted of price discounts
on rice and cooking oil and a nutrition education
component.
Agroecological conditions largely determine the production potential of an agrarian area and its ability to support a number of people. It seems to make sense, therefore, to base economic and policy ...research on ecoregional zones, rather than on geographical or political boundaries alone. This paper represents a first attempt to map the prevalence of underweight children by ecoregions, using malnutrition as a proxy for poverty. It indicates that the natural environment does play a role in poverty and malnutrition, but other socioeconomic factors have a strong influence. For example, much of Latin America and the Caribbean falls into ecoregions where children are prone to malnutrition, but the share of malnourished children is lower than would be expected because incomes are relatively high.
Procedures for assessing likely nutritional effects of development projects are discussed. Specific assessment of a large-scale development project in the Philippines is presented, showing that ...production-oriented components would improve the nutritional status of the project participants and that a planned water supply intervention would be effective in this regard. Emphasis is placed on targeting project components to the needy and avoiding the development of situations where increased income degrades nutritional benefits. (wz)
In agrarian developing countries the natural environment is a key determinant of both poverty and nutritional status. Climate, terrain, and soil characteristics drive the agricultural system, ...determining in large part cropping patterns, choice of crops, yield rates, and overall productivity levels. The human resources crucial to agricultural productivity are also influenced by the natural environment. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is placing priority on developing a concept of ecoregional zones based on the premise that agroecological conditions largely determine the production potential and the size of population that an area can support in the developing world. Understanding the ecoregional dimensions of poverty and malnutrition potentially could be a major step forward in alleviating poverty sustainably by the year 2020 because it may help to target scarce resources more effectively. There are clearly discernible links between the natural environment, agricultural productivity, health, and nutritional status. Use of an ecoregional dimension to explore the incidence of malnutrition exploits these linkages. Analysis at the ecoregional level suggests that targeting of scarce resources to address the problems of poverty and malnutrition could potentially be improved by 2020 by taking into consideration these linkages between ecoregional characteristics and poverty.
