This paper reports the impact on child schooling and work of the Government of Zambia's Child Grant Program (CGP), an unconditional cash transfer program targeted to households with children under age 3 years in three districts of the country. Although the CGP's focus is on very young children, we look to see if the program has impacts on older children who are not the explicit target group. We use data from a large-scale social experiment involving 2,519 households, half of whom were randomized out to a delayed-entry control group, that was implemented to assess the impact of the program. We find that the CGP has no discernable impact on school enrollment of children age 7-14. However when we break the sample by older (11-14) and younger (7-10) children - based on the grade structure of the Zambian schooling system - we find a significant impact among children age 11-14 which coincided with the exact age range where sharp drop-out begins to occur in Zambia with point estimates in the range of 7-8 percentage points. Finally, we provide evidence on the potential pathways through which the unconditional cash transfer impacts on enrollment. Households in the CGP spend more on education, and in particular on uniforms and shoes, two items cited as key barriers to school enrollment in study areas.

One of the most common instruments of industrial policy is Export Processing Zones (EPZs). This paper shows the results of a systematic review of the impact of EPZs on employment, wages and labour conditions in developing countries. The results of synthesising 59 studies suggest that there is no robust evidence that the employment created in the zones is additional. Also, in most cases, EPZs pay higher wages and do not contribute to increase the gender wage gap. The results regarding labour conditions such as health and safety, unionisation or hours worked are mixed when comparing with firms outside the EPZ.

Intestinal parasites affect millions of children globally. We aimed to assess effects of deworming children on nutritional and cognitive outcomes across potential effect modifiers using individual participant data (IPD). We searched multiple databases to 27 March 2018, grey literature, and other sources. We included randomised and quasi randomised trials of deworming compared to placebo or other nutritional interventions with data on baseline infection. We used a random-effects network meta-analysis with IPD and assessed overall quality, following a pre-specified protocol. We received IPD from 19 trials of STH deworming. Overall risk of bias was low. There were no statistically significant subgroup effects across age, sex, nutritional status or infection intensity for each type of STH. These analyses showed that children with moderate or heavy intensity infections, deworming for STH may increase weight gain (very low certainty). The added value of this review is an exploration of effects on growth and cognition in children with moderate to heavy infections as well as replicating prior systematic review results of small effects at the population level. Policy implications are that complementary public health strategies need to be assessed and considered to achieve growth and cognition benefits for children in helminth endemic areas.

Evaluations are key to learning and accountability. We assessed the methodological quality of 37 randomly selected programme evaluations from 5 major global health funders. Two researchers rated each evaluation for relevance, validity, and reliability and met to resolve discrepancies. Most evaluations asked questions relevant to the health programme, but less than 40 per cent of impact evaluations and less than 10 per cent of performance evaluations used relevant data, followed accepted social science methods for sampling, or had high analytical validity and reliability. There is a need to improve the methodological quality of programme evaluations.

Some research suggests women are more likely to allocate additional resources to their children than are men. This perception has influenced policies such as in-kind food transfer programs and cash transfer programs, which often target women recipients. We assess whether targeting in-kind rice transfers to female versus male adult household members has a differential impact on children's short-run nutritional status. We estimate the impacts of transfers of edible rice and rice seeds, randomly allocated to female or male adults, on three anthropometric indicators: BMI-for-age, arm-muscle area, and triceps skinfold thickness. The trial includes 481 children aged 3-11 years in a horticultural-foraging society of native Amazonians in Bolivia. On average, the gender of the transfer recipient does not influence child anthropometric dimensions, possibly due to norms of cooperation and sharing within and between households. We find limited evidence of heterogeneity in impacts. Transfers to women help children who were growth stunted at baseline to partially catch-up to their better-nourished age-sex peers and help boys (but not girls) and children in higher-income households increase their BMI-for-age. The results of this research point to the importance of considering cultural context in determining if allocating food transfers according to gender are most effective.