In northern Nigeria, researchers evaluated the impact of three community-based interventions designed to enhance uptake of maternal and child health services: a community health worker program, health educators with the provision of safe birth kits, and health educators with community dramas. While the community health educators increased utilization of maternal and infant care, health practices, and knowledge, none of the interventions improved maternal or child health outcomes.

Informal healthcare workers with little to no training provide more than 70 percent of all primary care in rural India. In this study, researchers evaluated the impact of a nine-month training...

Researchers partnered with banks in three countries to see if removing the costs to opening basic bank accounts would lead to more households opening and using bank accounts. Overall, use of the accounts was low across all three countries, and being offered a free, basic bank account had no impact on savings, expenditures, health, or education. These results suggest that policies focused only on expanding access to basic bank accounts that already exist in given location are unlikely to improve welfare, on average.

The Value Added Tax (VAT) system, which generates a paper trail on transactions between firms, facilitated tax enforcement by spreading the impact of enforcement measures up the production chain in a study with over 400,000 firms in Chile.

Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to measure the impact of offering subsidies to connect to the power grid on the demand for rural electrification in Kenya. The study finds that demand falls rapidly as connection price increases, and that supply costs are very high.