Development Impact Group

Can targeting women through public works improve their autonomy? In many low-income countries, women face disparities in autonomy compared to men, impacting their labor market participation, decision-making authority, and vulnerability to gender-based violence. Public works offer opportunities for earning income, potentially empowering women to assert greater influence over household decision-making and ultimately enhance their autonomy. Despite growing interest in integrating gender-focused approaches into anti-poverty interventions, including public works, there is limited causal evidence on how these interventions impact women’s autonomy.

Collaborating with the Development Impact Group, WFP embarked on a uniquely designed evaluation to examine how women working outside their homes affected their agency and well-being.

Currently spanning El Salvador, Kenya, Rwanda, and Haiti, this initiative offers insights from completed endline surveys in El Salvador, Kenya and Rwanda. Preliminary results indicate that the program improved households’ food security and consumption while the public works projects were ongoing. Additionally, encouraging women’s participation in the program increased their autonomy over household resources, though they experienced temporary backlash from men. Three months post-program, initial food security and consumption gains diminished, but women’s subjective well-being improved. Notably, communities promoting women’s involvement sustained women’s increased autonomy over household resources, with initial male backlash transforming into greater appreciation of women’s autonomy.

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Transforming Women's Participation Via Cash-based Transfer Programs

In 2023, nearly 282 million people in 59 countries and territories experienced high levels of acute hunger, with 75% living in countries where extreme weather events or conflict were the primary drivers of food insecurity (World Food Program GRFC, 2024). The frequent recurrence of extreme weather and conflicts in the past few decades has offset years of progress made in food security, nutrition, health, and education. To date, this Window has active evaluations in Mali, Niger, Rwanda, and South Sudan. Except Rwanda, these countries were classified by the World Bank as fragile and conflict-affected in 2022.

This Window uses baseline, high-frequency, and endline surveys to learn:

1. How does integrated programming, which brings together multiple activities aimed at improving different outcomes, contribute to resilience?

2. How do programming decisions on targeting or sequencing of activities affect resilience?

Preliminary results reveal high-frequency data collection is valuable for understanding food security dynamics and responsiveness to shocks. These programs improve absorptive capacities, or a household’s ability to cope during shocks, late in the lean season and around harvest. Additionally, household food insecurity fluctuates throughout the year, affecting how aid is targeted and the timing, duration, and type of support provided to maximize resilience interventions. There may be value in interventions implemented before or during shocks, alongside those focused on responding to shocks or supporting households during lean seasons. Upcoming endline evaluations will illuminate the sustainability of such programs and whether they can improve adaptive capacity – average food security – beyond short-term responses to shocks.

School meal programs are one of the most extensive social safety nets worldwide, with an estimated 418 million children benefiting from school feeding programs. . These interventions are intended to provide essential nutrition and educational incentives, but also act as a catalyst for local economies and sustainable food systems when school meals are procured locally.

This Window evaluates how school meal programs can be an important social safety net and contribute to children's resilience to shocks and foster human capital accumulation. It further assesses trade-offs in school meal programs’ designs and implementations to improve service delivery. To date, the Window includes Burundi – classified as fragile and conflict-affected by the World Bank in 2022 – Guatemala, Jordan, Malawi, The Gambia, and Madagascar.

The Window asks:

1. To what extent do different interventions, including modalities (in-school, take-home rations, or cash/voucher) or complementary activities, contribute to children's outcomes? How do these effects vary by age and gender?

2. To what extent do different interventions (modalities or complementary activities) contribute to greater girls' well-being?

3. To what extent do different procurement systems (for example, imported food versus locally grown school meals) improve food security and nutrition in supported communities?

   To what extent do different interventions support households' consumption and food security in the presence of shocks?

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Emerging Findings from a Portfolio of School Feeding Impact Evaluations

Anticipatory Action (AA, or Forecast-based Financing), which includes shock-responsive cash transfers, consists of integrated interventions targeted to populations vulnerable to climate hazards, pre-agreed at the community and government level, and linked to weather forecast triggers. These forecast triggers are informed by independent, verifiable and frequently reported data points measured and tracked by Early Warning Systems (EWS). Once triggers reach certain thresholds indicating a high probability of an extreme weather event, pre-agreed action plans are enabled and implemented before the shock occurrence. These include cash or in-kind transfers, warning messaging/information, health kits, and other complementary components (e.g., agricultural inputs, livelihoods, etc.).

This window, which is also linked to the Development Impact Group Rural and Social Protection and Jobs programs, assesses the optimal timing for providing humanitarian and development interventions to populations vulnerable to climate shocks. Evidence from Nepal (floods) and Niger (droughts) show that providing timely cash transfers in anticipation or during the occurrence of these weather events improved food security and psychosocial outcomes compared to delayed responses mobilized only after the shock. Additional studies are on-going for three WFP operations: Bangladesh (floods), the Philippines (typhoons), and Mozambique (droughts and floods).