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Previous research has shown that men and women, on average, have different risk attitudes and may therefore see different value propositions in response to new opportunities. We use data from smallholder farm households in Mali to test whether risk perceptions differ by gender and across domains. We model this potential association across six risks (work injury, extreme weather, community relationships, debt, lack of buyers, and conflict) while controlling for demographic and attitudinal characteristics. Factor analysis highlights extreme weather and conflict as eliciting the most distinct patterns of participant response. Regression analysis for Mali as a whole reveals an association between gender and risk perception, with women expressing more concern except in the extreme weather domain; however, the association with gender is largely absent when models control for geographic region. We also find lower risk perception associated with an individualistic and/or fatalistic worldview, a risk-tolerant outlook, and optimism about the future, while education, better health, a social orientation, self-efficacy, and access to information are generally associated with more frequent worry— with some inconsistency. Income, wealth, and time poverty exhibit complex associations with perception of risk. Understanding whether and how men’s and women’s risk preferences differ, and identifying other dominant predictors such as geographic region and worldview, could help development organizations to shape risk mitigation interventions to increase the likelihood of adoption, and to avoid inadvertently making certain subpopulations worse off by increasing the potential for negative outcomes.
In this report, we analyze the evidence that improved and expanded access to financial services can be a pathway out of poverty in Bangladesh and Tanzania. A brief background review of finance and poverty reduction evidence at the country, household, and individual level emphasizes the importance of a functioning financial system and the need to remove individual and household barriers to capital accumulation. We follow with an in-depth literature review on studies that link poverty reduction in Bangladesh or Tanzania with one or more of five financial intervention categories: remittances; government subsidies; conditional and unconditional cash transfers; credit; and combination programs. The resulting empirical evidence from these sources reveal a high share (61%) of positive reported associations between a financial intervention and outcome measure related to our five chosen financial interventions. The remaining studies found insignificant or mixed associations, but very few (3 out of 56) indicate that access to a financial mechanism was associated with worsened poverty. The heterogeneity of study types and interventions makes it difficult to draw conclusions about the efficacy of one intervention over another, and more research is needed on whether such approaches constitute a durable, long-term exit from poverty.
Common aid allocation formulas incorporate measures of income per capita but not measures of poverty, likely based on the assumption that rising average incomes are associated with reduced poverty. If declining poverty is the outcome of interest, however, the case of Nigeria illustrates that such aid allocation formulas could lead to poorly targeted or inefficient aid disbursements. Using data from the World Bank and the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics, we find that while the relationship between economic growth and poverty in Nigeria varies depending on the time period studied, overall from 1992-2009 Nigeria’s poverty rate has only declined by 6% despite a 70% increase in per capita gross domestic product (GDP). A review of the literature indicates that income inequality, the prominence of the oil sector, unemployment, corruption, and poor education and health in Nigeria may help to explain the pattern of high ongoing poverty rates in the country even in the presence of economic growth. Our analysis is limited by substantial gaps in the availability of quality data on measures of poverty and economic growth in Nigeria, an issue also raised in the literature we reviewed, but our findings support arguments that economic growth should not be assumed to lead to poverty reduction and that the relationship between these outcomes likely depends on contextual factors.