Across the world, governments used cash transfers, including unconditional transfers, to shield vulnerable people from the economic hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of December 2020, cash transfer schemes made up more than a third of the estimated 1400 social protection responses to the pandemic across 215 countries and territories.
In March of this year, UNAIDS launched the In Your Hands HIV self-testing campaign in the Caribbean, aiming to increase the proportion of HIV-positive individuals who know their status. In January, Senegal's government approved its new HIV self-testing strategy, working with a donor-funded program to promote and distribute the HIV self-tests in West Africa. These efforts join others around the world, with a push from the World Health Organization for countries to fast-track HIV self-testing.
Even bad news can be useful. In this case, as part of an upgrade of Colombia's childcare centres, a foundation called Fundación Éxito had planned to fund a new nutrition program for children. But it reversed course after an impact evaluation showed that the new nutrition component seemed to do more harm than good. Children's nutrition did not improve and some gained an excessive amount of weight.
How helpful can an evaluation be if it shows an intervention had no effects on desired outcomes? The first evaluation of a community-driven reconstruction (CDR) program called Tuungane, implemented in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is one such study. The evaluation did not show positive effects on all desired social and behavioural outcomes, but it did help the implementer, International Rescue Committee (IRC), revamp some of its systems.
With development evidence, as with many things, more is generally better. But there's a caveat: lots of evidence on a topic can easily be overwhelming unless there's a good synthesis to tease out the strong findings from the background noise.
In Nigeria, as in much of the developing world, many children never receive their full set of recommended immunizations. Even among children who receive some vaccinations, not all return for subsequent doses or later shots. In 2019, only 57 percent of infants in Nigeria completed their three-shot course of the DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis) vaccine.
The Malawi Social Cash Transfer Programme aims to address the needs of the most vulnerable populations, which are constrained from participating in the labour force because of age (too old or young), chronic illnesses or disabilities.
The last few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. What I know is that HIV self-testing has finally made it. At this year’s International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Science there were an array of posters, oral abstract presentations and satellite sessions on research related to HIV self-testing.
