Can government-allocated land contribute to food security? Intrahousehold analysis of West Bengal’s Microplot allocation program

Secure land rights are a critical, but often overlooked, factor in achieving household food security and improved nutritional status in rural areas of developing countries. This study evaluates the impact of India’s land-allocation and registration program in West Bengal, a program that targets poor populations and promotes the inclusion of women’s names on land titles. We use mixed methods data collected between 2010 and 2012 to examine the program’s selection of beneficiaries and a set of outcomes that are expected to lay the foundation for future food security, as well as short-term food security indicators. Our results indicate that the program’s implementation at the block level allowed for considerable variation in the processes used to select beneficiaries, to demarcate plots, to distribute titles and to provide infrastructure support. Although we were unable to detect statistically significant program effects on current house hold food security, we find that the land-allocation and registration program has had an impact on a range of outcomes that are expected to lead to future food security: beneficiary households report stronger security, and they are more likely to take loans for agricultural purposes, to invest in agricultural improvements, and to involve women when making decisions related to food and agriculture. These effects vary with plot size—larger plots lead to larger benefits —and depend on whose names are included on the land documents; the effects are larger if women’s names are recorded on the land titles

Aligning evidence generation and use across health, development, and environment

© 2019 The Authors Although health, development, and environment challenges are interconnected, evidence remains fractured across sectors due to methodological and conceptual differences in research and practice. Aligned methods are needed to support Sustainable Development Goal advances and similar agendas. The Bridge Collaborative, an emergent research-practice collaboration, presents principles and recommendations that help harmonize methods for evidence generation and use. Recommendations were generated in the context of designing and evaluating evidence of impact for interventions related to five global challenges (stabilizing the global climate, making food production sustainable, decreasing air pollution and respiratory disease, improving sanitation and water security, and solving hunger and malnutrition) and serve as a starting point for further iteration and testing in a broader set of contexts and disciplines. We adopted six principles and emphasize three methodological recommendations: (1) creation of compatible results chains, (2) consideration of all relevant types of evidence, and (3) evaluation of strength of evidence using a unified rubric. We provide detailed suggestions for how these recommendations can be applied in practice, streamlining efforts to apply multi-objective approaches and/or synthesize evidence in multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary teams. These recommendations advance the necessary process of reconciling existing evidence standards in health, development, and environment, and initiate a common basis for integrated evidence generation and use in research, practice, and policy design

Women's Access to Credit: Does It Matter for Household Efficiency?

Studies that assess the impact of credit constraints on farm households' efficiency have largely used the household as the unit of analysis. This can be problematic when there are gender-based market imperfections and asymmetries in how rights, resources, and responsibilities are distributed within the household. Constraints on women matter: in addition to the efficiency loss associated with the husbands' credit constraints, when women are unable to meet their needs for capital, their households experienced an additional 11% drop in efficiency. This suggests that there are efficiency-based arguments for enhancing women's access to capital and that studies based only on the household's head may significantly underestimate the true economic impact of credit constraints. Copyright 2008, Oxford University Press.