Food-for-work (FFW) programs are commonly used both for short-term relief and long-term development purposes. This paper assesses the potential of FFW programs to reduce poverty and promote sustainable land use in the longer run.

Investments in agricultural water management should complement or strengthen the livelihood and coping systems of the rural poor, and should thus be instrumental for breaking the poverty trap in Ethiopia.

Water resources are essential to human development processes and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals that seek, inter alia, to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal literacy, and ensure environmental sustainability.

This paper evaluates the ex post impact of adopting improved groundnut varieties on crop income and poverty in rural Uganda. The study utilizes cross-sectional data of 927 households, collected in 2006, from seven districts in Uganda.

This paper evaluates the ex-post impact of adopting improved groundnut varieties on crop income and rural poverty in rural Uganda. The study utilizes cross-sectional farm household data collected in 2006 in seven districts of Uganda.

In this paper, we study the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) in Ethiopia in order to see how it has affected households’ investment and disinvestment in productive assets. The PSNP is the largest currently operating social protection program in sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa, and its impacts and effectiveness are therefore important both in their own right and because they have implications for similar but smaller programs elsewhere.

This paper studies the impact of the largest conservation set-aside program in the developing world, China’s Grain for Green program, on poverty alleviation in rural areas. Based on a large-scale survey, we find that although poor households in rural China were not disproportionately targeted, they have benefited.

The Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative is intended to improve the situation of the poorest developing countries by reducing their debt burden and by permitting increased spending on education and health services. However, at the same time the developed countries funding the HIPC initiative retain agricultural policies that hinder exports form the developing countries in those sectors where they have comparative advantages.

This chapter of the book uses a computable general equilibrium (CGE)
approach to capture the different interactions and their influence on the consequent impact of policy reforms on the economy and deforestation in Namibia.