1 October 2025, 13:30 CET
Seminar Room 1.103
Kibrom Abay
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Trust in local leadership is critical for delivering public goods and services, especially in conflict-affected and post-conflict settings where local institutions and markets remain weak, and peacebuilding and recovery efforts are crucial. Thus, identifying avenues and instruments to rebuild trust in local leadership remains important. Building on a recent and largescale armed conflict in Ethiopia, we study the impact of a randomized community-based cash transfer on trust in local leadership. The randomized cash transfer was introduced after the recent war in Ethiopia and its implementation involved local community leaders, some of whom may have participated in the conflict. We find that exposure to armed conflict is associated with a significant deterioration in trust in local leaders, while the community-based cash transfer recovers some of the deteriorated trust. We provide suggestive evidence that the impacts of cash transfer are driven not only by those who receive the cash transfer but also by non-beneficiary households in communities where the cash transfer is implemented. Our heterogeneity analysis reveals that the treatment effect is largely driven by poor households and households which do not benefit from government safety net programs. These results have important implications for policy design in post-conflict and fragile settings.
Sarah Elven
London School of Economics
As the impacts of climate change are felt increasingly around the world, the need for effective social protection mechanisms to support vulnerable populations is growing. Research to support the design of such programs is of great importance, since the full range of impacts of a changing climate are still unknown. This paper offers the first robust empirical evidence for the effectiveness of social protection designed to support drought-vulnerable communities in Mozambique. The study evaluates the impact of timely unconditional cash transfers on the preparation, coping and adaptation behaviors of recipients, using payment delays in some of the sample to identify effects. In the short term, receiving an on-time payment allowed households to save - both in cash and in kind - and to diversify their income streams, resulting in fewer damaging coping strategies during hard times. Income diversification persisted in the medium term, with a greater move to off-farm business and wage employment amongst treated households, and greater perceived resilience to droughts. However, the paper identifies ways in which transfer impacts on adaptive capacity may have been limited: such as low opportunity for investment or income diversification in rural areas. It also argues that the mode of payment delivery may have curtailed program impacts for those who received timely payments, whilst also causing harm to those paid with delay.
Sudhanshu Handa
University of North Carolina
This paper investigates the effects of UNHCR’s cash-based interventions on Ukrainian refugees in Moldova. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moldova has been one of the main countries receiving refugees who are either passing through the country or staying longer term. By the end of 2024 over 136,000 Ukrainian refugees were living in Moldova, of which about roughly 15 percent receive multi-purpose cash assistance (MPCA) from UNHCR. The assessment uses a mixed-methods approach with two waves of survey data (N=700) administered six months apart in 2024 on refugees with different numbers of MPCA payments. We use a dosage model to estimate the impact of an additional payment on outcomes across four domains: well-being, protection, inclusion and access to services. Results indicate positive effects on indicators within each of these domains, with improvements in food security and diet diversity, employment and access to other support programs, improvements in schooling of older children and increased access to health services. The quantitative results are consistent with qualitative data from focus group discussions with refugees. An accompanying local-economy analysis, not reported in this paper, estimates a significant spillover effect of the MPCA, with each dollar of transfer generating an additional $1.02 of income, most of which accrues to host community households through the increased demand for goods and services supplied by businesses owned by Moldovans.