A deeper understanding of what causes the poor to be reluctant to plan, save and invest in their future may provide valuable insights into designing interventions that address the source of the problem, not just the symptoms, to create lasting change.

Compared to cash transfers, where it is possible to simply give the poor target population money, asset transfers are clearly more complicated and have more limited scope since not everyone can be a successful small-scale farmer.

Beneficiaries of the agro-input subsidy and the matched savings intervention who were among the poorest increased their planning horizon as a result of their improved economic prospects.

With appropriate caution given to the findings on household living standards, it is fair to say that the program succeeded for many, but not all targeted households.

Si bien es cierto que si el programa no afectó de manera uniforme a todos los participantes eso no significa que el programa haya fracasado, es importante entender para quién y para cuántas familias el programa realmente logró aumentar los niveles de vida y combatir la pobreza.

This briefing paper summarizes a baseline survey of health centres affiliated with the SKY micro-health insurance program in rural Cambodia.

Our results suggest that most uninsured households will probably take on debt to pay for health care at some point in their lives. A substantial minority of those households will also sell productive assets such as land. SKY health insurance cuts the rates of these events by about a third.

Both men and women report a relatively high degree of joint ownership of land, even though women’s names are rarely on the official documents and women may lose rights to land if their marriage dissolves.

Designing social protection schemes should also take into account the prevalence of shocks, the severity of their impact, and whose assets are used to cope with them.

The recognition that illness shocks can be detrimental to poor people's well-being appears to receive less attention in Bangladesh than covariate shocks such as floods, precisely because illness is an idiosyncratic event, while widespread flooding easily attracts national and international attention.