30 September 2025, 15:30 CET
Seminar Room 1.103
Rute Martins Caeiro
University of Oxford
This paper examines the role of social protection in mitigating the adverse effects of conflict on household welfare. We assess the impact of a graduation intervention linked to Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme, focusing on Amhara, a region severely affected by the Tigray conflict. Using data from a large randomized controlled trial and panel surveys conducted before and after the conflict, we evaluate the effectiveness of social protection in conflict settings. Our estimation strategy leverages variation in conflict exposure combined with exogenous programme participation. We find that conflict significantly reduces food expenditures, but social protection mitigates this effect, leading to improved food security and lower poverty rates among beneficiaries compared to non-beneficiaries. However, we find no impact on asset accumulation. These findings underscore the role of social protection in shielding vulnerable households from conflict’s worst effects while highlighting its limitations in fostering long-term resilience.
Rocco Zizzamia
University of Oxford
Climate change is intensifying the frequency and severity of weather-related shocks, disproportionately affecting vulnerable households in low- and middle-income countries. This paper investigates how poor, resource-constrained communities in cyclone-prone Bangladesh adapt to repeated climate disruptions, focusing on migration and insurance as potential adaptation strategies. We combine structured survey data with open-ended qualitative interviews, embedding the latter within a pre-registered analytical framework supported by natural language processing to reduce researcher bias. Our stratified sample compares households with access to BRAC’s Ultra Poor Graduation Programme, microcredit, or neither, allowing us to examine whether social protection and financial services influence adaptation behaviour. Despite high vulnerability and expectations of worsening shocks, we find limited evidence of explicitly adaptive behaviour, with migration remaining primarily seasonal and insurance constrained by information frictions.
Jennifer Waidler
World Food Programme
In response to increasingly frequent extreme weather events, humanitarian institutions are leveraging early-warning systems to speed up aid delivery. We present evidence from a randomized controlled trial in Bangladesh and Nepal that evaluated the efficacy of providing anticipatory cash assistance. The study tested whether cash delivered within days of a flood provides greater benefits than the same assistance delivered months later. Our findings demonstrate that early intervention generates substantial overall improvements in household food security and psychosocial well-being. This evidence supports efforts to forecast crises and release disaster relief funding rapidly to maximize impact.