Understanding the level of vaccine acceptance is crucial for the design and implementation of public health campaigns to achieve mass vaccination against COVID-19. Phone surveys have been the most frequent way to collect this information, yet they pose measurement challenges that could bias the results. Researchers are analyzing data from two large-scale surveys, one from the World Bank and one from IPA, to determine how sampling issues, especially selection and attrition biases, influence vaccination acceptance measurement in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Industrial sector development is seen as an important poverty alleviation strategy for reducing un- and underemployment in low-income countries. But how those jobs affect workers, particularly in early stages of industrial sector development, and the extent to which workers prefer these jobs over others is less well-understood. In Ethiopia, researchers randomly assigned mostly female jobseekers to receive an industrial job offer or an unconditional cash transfer, meant to spur self-employment. While they found positive impacts of the cash transfers on occupational choice, income, and health in the first year, these effects largely dissipated after five years, suggesting one-time interventions may be insufficient for overcoming barriers to wage- or self-employment.

More than one fifth of the world’s population lives on less than US$1.25 per day. While many credit and training programs have not been successful at raising income levels for these ultra-poor households, recent support for livelihoods programs has spurred interest in evaluating whether comprehensive “big push” interventions may allow for a sustainable transition to self-employment and a higher standard of living. To test this theory, researchers evaluated a globally implemented “Graduation” approach to measure its impact on the lives of the ultra-poor. They found that the approach had long-lasting economic and self-employment impacts and that the long-run benefits outweighed their up-front costs. Here we summarize the Ethiopia site, which had similar effects as the other successful sites.