Irrigation strengthens climate resilience: Long-term evidence from Mali using satellites and surveys.

Agriculture in the Sahel and much of sub-Saharan Africa remains to a large extent rainfed. At the same time, climate change is already causing less predictable rainfall patterns in the region, even as rising temperatures increase the amount of water needed for agricultural production. We assess to what extent irrigation can strengthen the climate resilience of farming communities. Our study sample consists of nearly 1,000 distinct locations in Mali in which small-scale, river-based irrigation was introduced over the past two decades, as weather conditions worsened and political upheaval erupted. Using the staggered roll-out of the irrigation and repeated observations over 20 years allows us to compare the pre- and postirrigation outcomes of locations while adjusting for confounding factors. We geospatially link data on irrigation interventions with agricultural conditions measured using satellite imagery and surveys, as well as child nutrition and health outcomes and conflict event data. Using a two-way fixed effects model to quasi-experimentally estimate counterfactual outcomes, we find that the introduction of irrigation led to substantial increases in agricultural production on supported fields, with these gains persisting even a decade later. Children in nearby communities are less likely to be stunted or wasted due to the irrigation, and conflict risks decrease in the closest communities. Some of these gains are offset by worsening conditions farther away from the newly installed irrigation. These findings suggest that, even with political conflicts in semi-arid areas already increasing, sustainable irrigation may offer a valuable tool to improve communities' long-term well-being and social cohesion.

Prevalence of school related violence in seven countries: A cross-sectional survey.

Violence against children in schools harms the affected children, limits their learning and educational attainment, and extends its harms to families and the broader communities. However, to date, comparable cross-country data on violence against children in schools has not been available. We utilize the Violence Against Children and Youth Surveys (VACS) to estimate school-related violence against children in seven countries (Honduras, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia). Leveraging the unique comparability of the surveys, we are able to estimate both physical and sexual violence experienced in childhood and adolescence among youth aged 13-24. Where possible, we also disaggregate by gender and perpetrator type. Overall, within our sample seven countries, we find that 12.11-44.63% of females and 14.28-53.85% of males experienced at least one form of violence. Males experience higher levels of school-related violence and a significant portion of this is due to experiencing physical violence perpetrated by male classmates.

The economic efficiency of aid targeting.

How efficient is the targeting of foreign aid to populations in need? A long literature has focused on the impacts of foreign aid, but much rarer are studies that examine how such aid is allocated within countries. We examine the extent to which donors efficiently respond to exogenous budget shocks by shifting resources toward needier districts within a given country, as predicted by theory. We use recently geocoded data on the World Bank's aid in 23 countries that crossed the lower-middle income threshold between 1995 and 2010 and thus experienced sharp aid reductions. We measure locations' need along a number of dimensions, including nighttime lights emissions, population density, conflict exposure, and child mortality. We find little evidence that aid project siting is increasingly concentrated in worse-off areas as budgets shrink; the only exception appears to be a growing share of funding in more conflict-affected areas. We further analyze the relationship of health aid to child mortality measures in six key countries, again finding little evidence of efficient responses to budget shocks. Taken together, these results suggest that large efficiency gains may be possible in the distribution of aid from the World Bank and other donors.

Childhood health and the changing distribution of foreign aid: Evidence from Nigeria's transition to lower-middle-income status.

With sustained economic growth in many parts of the developing world, an increasing number of countries are transitioning away from the most subsidized development finance as they exceed income and other qualification requirements. Cross-country evidence suggests that Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors view the crossing over of the World Bank's International Development Association (IDA) eligibility threshold to signal that a country needs less aid, with subsequent reductions in both IDA and other donors' concessional funding. Within the health sector, it is particularly important to understand the implications of these status changes for children under five years of age since improving early childhood health is critical to fostering health and social and economic development. Therefore, we examine the implications of the IDA transition by measuring the extent t which World Bank commitments-including both IDA and IBRD-are directed to infant and child health needs in Nigeria. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) models were used in a difference-in-differences (DID) strategy to compare World Bank IBRD/IDA lending before and after the crossover to regions with varying initial levels of under-five and infant need. We find that the infant need orientation of World Bank aid has increased post-crossover. Conversely, alignment of World Bank commitments to regional child needs appears to have diminished after Nigeria crosses the IDA threshold. However, these effects are statistically insignificant and therefore provides inconclusive evidence. This research addresses an important policy question because the transition away from concessional funding mechanisms will result in difficult tradeoffs in allocating limited health resources; without providing conclusive evidence that crossover results in changes in need-based allocation, it does offer an essential path for future research. These results are directly relevant to policy debates about what we know and do not know about aid in transition and health. This research's value is especially important in the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) era in understanding how donor exits could derail progress in health improvement.

The impact of an insecticide treated bednet campaign on all-cause child mortality: A geospatial impact evaluation from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

OBJECTIVE: To test the impact of a nationwide Long-Lasting Insecticidal Nets [LLINs] distribution program in the Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC] on all-cause under-five child mortality exploiting subnational variation in malaria endemicity and the timing in the scale-up of the program across provinces. DESIGN: Geospatial Impact Evaluation using a difference-in-differences approach. SETTING: Democratic Republic of the Congo. PARTICIPANTS: 52,656 children sampled in the 2007 and 2013/2014 DRC Demographic and Health Surveys. INTERVENTIONS: The analysis provides plausibly causal estimates of both average treatment effects of the LLIN distribution campaign and geospatial heterogeneity in these effects based on malaria endemicity. It compares the under-five, all-cause mortality for children pre- and post-LLIN campaign relative to children in those areas that had not yet been exposed to the campaign using a difference-in-differences model and controlling for year- and province-fixed effects, and province-level trends in mortality. RESULTS: We find that the campaign led to a 41% decline [3.7 percentage points, 95% CI 1.3 to 6.0] in under-5 mortality risk among children living in rural areas with malaria ecology above the sample median. Results were robust to controlling for household assets and the presence of other health aid programs. No effect was detected in children living in areas with malaria ecology below the median. CONCLUSION: The findings of this paper make important contributions to the evidence base for the effectiveness of large scale-national LLIN campaigns against malaria. We found that the program was effective in areas of the DRC with the highest underlying risk of malaria. Targeting bednets to areas with greatest underlying risk for malaria may help to increase the efficiency of increasingly limited malaria resources but should be balanced against other malaria control concerns.