researcher spotlight

Akhter Ahmed is a Senior Research Fellow in the IFPRI’s Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit and Country Representative for IFPRI Bangladesh. He has worked on strategies for agricultural and rural development, social protection, and women’s empowerment to reduce poverty, food insecurity, and undernutrition in developing countries including Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Malawi, the Philippines, and Turkey.

TOPIC

Social Protection

Social protection aims to reduce poverty, increase opportunity, and strengthen individuals’ and households’ resilience to shocks. Social protection includes social assistance (such as cash transfers, public works, or school feeding), social insurance (such as old age pension, health insurance, and crop insurance), social care (such as family support services), and labor and economic inclusion (such as job search programs or economic inclusion programs). Social protection targets multiple risks (poverty, health, employment, natural disaster) at various stages of the life cycle (childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age).

IFPRI conducts rigorous impact evaluations on a variety of social protection programs, including unconditional and conditional cash transfer programs; emergency assistance in the form of cash and/or food; school feeding programs; maternal and child health and nutrition programs; public works programs; and insurance programs. These impact evaluations use state-of-the-art methodologies to evaluate the impacts of these policies and identify the most cost-effective designs for social protection programs.

Evaluations in social protection have assessed effects on poverty and food security as well as a wide range of other outcomes, including maternal and child health and nutrition, women’s empowerment, intimate partner violence, financial inclusion, labor, schooling, and mental health. Recently, IFPRI has focused on assessing how social protection can protect the well-being of individuals and households in LMICs against negative impacts of climate change and facilitate their adaptation to a changing climate. IFPRI had conducted impact evaluations of social protection programs and related research in Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, Malawi, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Turkey. It has also pointed to the important role these programs can play in crises including the COVID-19 pandemic, conflict, and regional exposure to natural disasters.

IFPRI’s research on this topic is closely aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG1, SDG2, and SDG16, and the CGIAR Impact Areas on Nutrition, Health, and Food Security; Poverty Reduction, Livelihoods, and Jobs; and Gender Equality, Youth, and Social Inclusion.