Informal Safety Nets Research Articles

Cost of a Policy: Social Trust and Health Insurance Uptake in Azerbaijan and Emerging Markets

Abstract Do low levels of social trust increase a population’s sense of insecurity and desire to get an insurance policy or alternatively make it turn to informal networks for safety nets? While generalized social trust is an important variable to explain insurance uptake, the existing literature offers conflicting accounts of its impact on a population’s insurance demand. By employing a mixed-methods research design that combines multivariate regression of large-N cross-country data with a qualitative case study of Azerbaijan, the study provides a systematic analytical measurement of the impact of social trust on the voluntary purchase of health insurance in 93 emerging markets. The article finds a statistically significant positive effect of generalized trust on voluntary health insurance purchases. The findings suggest that in countries with a low level of social trust, people favor informal safety nets rather than formal contracts with insurance firms.

From kinship networks to culture of relatedness: a shift of safety nets during health pandemics in the kenyan context.

Evidence suggests that, during pandemics such as COVID-19, people with low incomes within developing countries suffered disproportionately. Households across countries differentially experienced the socio-economic impact of the pandemic. In sub-Saharan Africa, the extended family and the community have provided valuable support in crises, given that state-administered backing may not be sufficient or may differ from the family's expectations. Many studies have been conducted on community safety nets, yet little description and understanding of community safety nets has been provided. The components of the non-formal safety nets are yet to be adequately defined or evaluated for effectiveness. Traditional family and community safety nets have been under stress due to the impact of COVID-19. Many countries, including Kenya, have associated COVID-19 with an increased number of households facing social and economic crises. Families and communities got fatigued due to the extended period and the further strain the pandemic had on individuals and societies. Utilizing existing literature on the socio-economic impact of COVID-19 in Kenya and the roles and perceptions of community safety nets, this paper seeks to explain the roles and perceptions of social relationships and kinship networks as safety nets in Africa, specifically in the Kenyan context. This paper employs the concept of culture of relatedness to understand the informal safety nets in Kenya better. During the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals strengthened the previously weakened kinship structures. They addressed some of the challenges experienced within the networks through the involvement of neighbors and friends embracing the culture of relatedness. Therefore, government strategies for social support during pandemics need to design programs to strengthen the community safety nets that remained resilient throughout the health crisis.

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Effect of Climate Smart Agriculture Innovations on Climate Resilience among Smallholder Farmers: Empirical Evidence from the Choke Mountain Watershed of the Blue Nile Highlands of Ethiopia

Smallholder farmers’ capacities need to be strengthened to enable them to better withstand the upcoming impacts of climate change; these capacities not only include the responsive capacity, but also consider innovation, learning, and anticipation to be prepared for the projected impacts of a changing climate on the agriculture system. The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of climate smart agriculture (CSA) innovations on building climate resilience capacity in smallholder agriculture systems. A cross-sectional household survey was conducted among a multi-stage sample of 424 smallholder farmers selected from five agroecosystems of the Upper Blue Nile Highlands in Ethiopia. The study used an endogenous switching regression (ESR) model to examine the impact of CSA innovations on building climate resilience capacity among smallholder farmers. The true average adoption effects of climate resilience capacity under actual and counterfactual conditions showed that different CSA innovations have different effects on the climate resilience capacity of households. Except for SWC adopters, all CSA innovations significantly increased the climate resilience capacity of households. However, improved variety, crop residue management, and SWC have more profound effects on the non-adopters than adopters, =if non-adopters had adopted these CSA innovations. Strong absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities through strong disaster and early warning systems, climate-resilient infrastructure, a strong public agricultural extension system, a strong informal safety net, and social networks build a climate-resilient agriculture system among smallholder farmers. Thus, scaling up of CSA innovations may expand the benefit of CSA innovation on building the climate resilience capacities of households. Thus, strong risk management, disaster mitigation and early warning systems, adaptive strategies, information and training, informal safety nets, social networks, and infrastructure use may build the climate resilience capacity of smallholder farmers by facilitating the adoption of CSA innovation. Therefore, policies that strengthen good governance, social cohesion, disaster communication and early warning systems, input supply of drought-resistant varieties, climate smart extension service, and climate-resilient infrastructure are necessary.

Cash Transfers, Trust, and Inter-household Transfers: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania

AbstractInstitutionalized conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs may affect pre-existing, informal safety nets such as inter-household transfers and trust among community members. This study reports on a randomized controlled trial used to test the impact of CCTs on various measures of trust and informal safety nets within communities in Tanzania. It provides evidence that the introduction of a CCT program increased program beneficiaries’ trust in other community members and their perceived ability to access support from other households (e.g., childcare). Although CCTs reduced the total size of transfers to beneficiary households in the community in the short run (after 1.75 years of transfers), that reduction had disappeared 2.75 years after transfers began. Taken together, this evidence suggests that formal CCT programs do not necessarily crowd out informal safety nets in the longer term, and they may in fact boost trust and support across households.

Making Improvisations, Reconfiguring Livelihoods: Surviving the COVID-19 Lockdown by Urban Residents in Uganda

The declaration of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic led to the enforcement of national lockdowns in several countries. While lockdowns are generally effective in containing the spread of infectious diseases, they are associated with negative impacts on livelihoods. Although evidence suggests that urban informal sector populations in low-resource settings bore the brunt of the adverse economic effects of COVID-19 lockdowns, there is little on how they survived. The article provides insights into the survival mechanisms of urban informal sector populations during a COVID-19 lockdown. Data are from narrative interviews with 30 residents of Kampala City and surrounding areas. We found that the COVID-19 lockdown chiefly jeopardized the livelihoods of urban residents through job loss and reduced incomes. Affected individuals and households primarily survived by making improvisations such as adjusting expenditures and reconfiguring their livelihoods. The cardinal elements of the informal sector, such as limited regulation, served as both a facilitator and constraint to survival. Therefore, the informal sector is an important buffer against livelihood shocks in situations of crisis. However, its inherent limitations imply that promoting livelihood resilience among urban residents during lockdowns and similar shocks may necessitate harnessing both formal and informal safety nets.

How specific resilience pillars mitigate the impact of drought on food security: Evidence from Uganda

Uganda continues to be prone to climate shocks especially drought which has adverse impact on food security. This paper studies household resilience capacities with special focus on how different resilience capacities mitigate the impact of drought on food security. The study follows the TANGO framework to identify resilience components, and two-step factor analysis to construct three resilience capacity indexes (absorptive, adaptive, and transformative) and overall resilience capacity index. To examine the mitigating role of resilience capacities, we interact resilience capacity indexes with the different measures of drought. The study employs a panel data from the Uganda National Panel Surveys (UNPS) undertaken between 2010/11 and 2018/19, spanning five waves. To minimise the bias arising from subjective self-reported drought shock, we introduce an objective measure of drought from the global SPEI database into the UNPS data. We also address attrition bias by controlling for attrition hazard estimated from the attrition function. Our analysis reveals that households in Uganda exhibit significantly low and nearly static resilience capacities. This implies majority of households in Uganda remain highly vulnerable to food insecurity in the event of severe drought. The study shows that building resilience capacities is an effective way of protecting households from such devastating situation. Whereas there are mixed results on the effectiveness of different resilience capacities in mitigating the effects of drought depending on the measure of food security and drought, decomposition of each of the three resilience capacities reveals critical aspects in each capacity. Succinctly, access to climate related information and linking social capital are very critical under adaptive capacity, infrastructure services are very key under transformative capacity, while informal safety nets are critical under absorptive capacity. Therefore, interventions that enhance households’ access to the above aspects are very important in building resilience to shocks, especially drought.

Acute care utilization and housing hardships in American children

Millions of families in the United States are economically vulnerable: one shock can lead to hardship. We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the association between acute healthcare utilization – emergency room visits or hospitalizations – and subsequent housing hardships, such as being evicted for financial reasons. Further, we explore whether this association differs by who in the family utilized the care and whether perceived social support protects against hardship when these experiences occur. Using lagged dependent variable regression models, we find that families that visited the emergency room or were hospitalized, regardless if it was a child or parent with this experience, were five percentage points more likely to experience any housing hardship than families that did not use acute care. Among families in which a child utilized acute care, perceived social support buffered the impact of using acute care. That perceived social support is associated with a lower likelihood of housing hardship among families that experienced acute care utilization for a child, but not parent, suggests that social support may be able to offset the challenges arising from children’s, but not adults’, use of acute care. In the face of economic precarity, informal safety nets may be insufficient to reduce the impact of acute care utilization on housing hardships.

COVID-19 in Afghanistan: Evaluating Health Vulnerability and Identifying Controlling Mechanism

Background: The insistent range of coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis and its permeation into least developed countries has escalated the bar of countries fragility and susceptibility. Afghanistan is amongst the most affected countries by the COVID-19 pandemic certainly due to its poor health infrastructure and conflict affected demography. Objective: This study intends to assess the health vulnerability profile and identifying the control mechanism of the north and northeast regions of Afghanistan using the IPCC framework. Method: A pre-evaluated online questionnaire (Google form) and mobile survey of 361 households distributed in 8 provinces across the both zones to collected the primary data. Exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity covered the three main components of vulnerability index, weighing method of Iyenger and Sudershan is used to estimate the fabricate vulnerability index. Result: The province’s health vulnerability status was classified to the different groups based on beta distribution. Based on the vulnerability index, 62.5% of provinces were highly vulnerable, 25% moderately and 37.5% were least vulnerable. Conclusion: In north-east region people were highly vulnerable to COVID-19 in terms of sensitivity and exposure, with low copping capacity to cope with COVID-19 pandemic risks compare to the north zone. Recommendation: Enhancing health and hygiene facilities and a handful of lowcost methods such as strengthen informal safety nets and introducing small-scale regional infrastructure projects, could be most cost effective and viable options. Originality: The research work is original and has not been published in other publications. As well, no financial support has been received for the study.

Rural Social Safety Nets for Migrant Farmworkers in Michigan, 1942–1971

ABSTRACTIn the 1960s, farmers pressed trespass charges against aid workers providing assistance to agricultural laborers living on the farmers’ private property. Some of the first court decisions to address these types of trespass, such as the well-known and frequently taught State v. Shack (1971), limited the property rights of farmers and enabled aid workers to enter camps where migrants lived. Yet there was a world before Shack, a world in which farmers welcomed onto their land rural religious groups, staffed largely by women from the local community, who provided services to migrant workers. From the 1940s through the 1960s, federal, state, and local law left large gaps in labor protections and government services for migrant agricultural laborers in Michigan. In response, church women created rural safety nets that mobilized local generosity and provided aid. This article uses Michigan as a case study to argue that these informal safety nets also policed migrant morality, maintained rural segregation, and performed surveillance of community outsiders, thereby serving the farmers’ goals of having a reliable and cheap labor force—ultimately strengthening the economic and legal structures that left agricultural workers vulnerable.

Safety Nets, Maternal Mental Health, and Child Mental Health Outcomes among Mothers Living in Poverty

Of the 40 million people living in poverty in the U.S., approximately 28% are single mothers and 18% are children. Low family income is linked with negative outcomes including higher rates of child mental health concerns. Due to limited public benefit availability, mothers often must rely on informal safety nets, or support from family or friends, to make ends meet. However, these informal safety nets are often coupled with burden, or obligations. To further increase their vulnerability, mothers living in poverty face higher levels of poor mental health. Also, both maternal mental health and safety nets can change over time. The purpose of this study was to examine informal safety nets, including informal support and burden, and maternal mental health and their longitudinal effects on mental health symptoms of children living in low-income families. Relying on data from the Welfare, Children, Families project, descriptive results showed change in informal safety nets, maternal mental health, and child mental health over time, with decline or multiple changes more common than improvement. Multilevel change models indicated safety nets and maternal mental health were associated with child outcomes such that mothers with minimal safety nets, higher psychological distress, and higher parenting stress had children with significantly higher mental health symptoms compared to children whose mothers had healthy safety nets and less distress. Findings speak to the importance of interventions that target both mothers and children in low-income families.

Commentary: COVID‐19 Pandemic and Higher Education: International Mobility and Students’ Social Protection

Commentary: COVID‐19 Pandemic and Higher Education: International Mobility and Students’ Social Protection

Legal Landscapes, Migrant Labor, and Rural Social Safety Nets in Michigan, 1942-1971

In the 1960s, farmers pressed trespass charges against aid workers providing assistance to agricultural laborers living on the farmers’ private property. Some of the first court decisions to address these types of trespass, such as the well-known and frequently taught State v. Shack (1971), limited the property rights of farmers and enabled aid workers to enter camps where migrants lived. Yet there was a world before Shack, a world in which farmers welcomed onto their land rural religious groups, staffed largely by women from the local community, who provided services to migrant workers. This article uses Michigan as a case study to examine the informal safety net those rural women created and how it ultimately strengthened the very economic and legal structures that left agricultural workers vulnerable. From the 1940s through the 1960s, federal, state, and local law left large gaps in labor protections and government services for migrant agricultural laborers in Michigan. In response, church women created rural safety nets that mobilized local generosity and provided aid. These informal safety nets also policed migrant morality, maintained rural segregation, and performed surveillance of community outsiders, thereby serving the farmers’ goals of having a reliable and cheap labor force.

Climate change vulnerability and adaptation strategies for smallholder farmers in Yangi Qala District, Takhar, Afghanistan

Abstract Smallholder farmers in Afghanistan are already facing various risks in agricultural production due to past continuous insurgencies. Climate change is likely to amplify the risk and make them even more vulnerable. The present study attempted to evaluate the vulnerability profiles of smallholder farmers due to climate change using the IPCC Framework. Primary data on relevant parameters for assessing climate change-led social vulnerability in the region were collected by classifying study region into two zones: the plain and the hills of Yangi Qala District in Takhar province, Afghanistan. Thirteen villages from each zone were selected at random, and face-to-face interviews were conducted with ten randomly selected households in each of the selected villages in both zones based on a pre-tested questionnaire. The questionnaire contained indicators for all three dimensions of vulnerability: exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. The collected data were subjected to a proposed vulnerability index, after estimating the indices of the three dimensions of vulnerability. The Iyenger and Sudershan weighting method was used to assess the contribution of each vulnerability dimension. Vulnerability was classified according to different categories based on beta distribution to evaluate the villages’ vulnerability status. The results showed that about 23% of all 26 sampled villages in both zones had low exposure, 26% moderate exposure and 51% high exposure to climate-change hazards and extreme weather events. High sensitivity was observed in 51%, moderate sensitivity in 7%, and low sensitivity in 42% of villages. High adaptive capacity to climate change was observed in 38% of villages, 19% were moderately adaptive and 42% showed a low adaptive capacity. High vulnerability was observed in 50% of villages, 4% were moderately vulnerable, and 46% had low vulnerability. A high proportion of smallholder farmers in the hilly zone in the sampled district were highly vulnerable, exposed and sensitive with a low adaptive capacity to climate change compared to the plain zone. The high vulnerability in the hilly zone was attributed to limited resources with a low adjustment capability to counter the disturbances, especially in crop cultivation, in response to climate change. A handful of low-cost and local approaches such as improving farmer extension services, introducing small-scale local infrastructure projects, reinforcing informal safety nets and protecting natural ecosystems could be viable cost-effective options that would also be sustainable given their low recurring costs and the limited maintenance required.

When solidarity fails: Heterogeneous effects on children from adult deaths in Senegalese households

Abstract The consequences of orphanhood have been an important topic on the research agenda in recent years, particularly against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. Previous literature has highlighted negative effects on children from prime-age adult deaths in the household. Some authors have however pointed out that the effects are small, possibly as a result of well-functioning coping mechanisms prevailing in the region. Furthermore, previous literature has not focused on the role of household living and budgetary arrangements. In this article, we investigate the links between deaths in the household and subsequent economic outcomes of children. Exploiting an unusually rich dataset from Senegal that permits us to precisely identify the main caregiver of a given child in the household, we test whether impacts on children differ according to their relationship with the deceased. We find robust evidence that this is the case: deaths in the household are not associated with diminished school presence for those children who are not under the direct responsibility of the deceased. They however have a strong significant negative effect for those children who are. On the basis of our results, which include effects on child labor, we argue that in large and complex households, intra-household inequality in access to resources are an essential part of the story that may well lead to a heterogeneous absorption of shocks among family members. As such, there may be important limits to African informal safety nets.

Formal finance and informal safety nets of the poor: Evidence from a savings field experiment

Using a field experiment on financial service information delivery in over 320 villages in Malawi, I find that formal savings increases agricultural investments and crop income, and raises private transfers to other households during the hungry season. Households with higher education adopt accounts and experience rises in savings and income, while low education households do not. However, the benefits to adopters are used to help insure the rest of the village – in contrast to suggestions elsewhere in the literature that savings may negatively impact sharing through networks. Non-savers experience large rises in transfer receipts, improved food consumption, and better health. The worst-off households experience particularly strong increases in informal aid. Findings show financial markets expansion has immediate effects beyond service-users, with large and surprising impacts on informal support systems. Results also support the effectiveness of a novel method to spur service uptake and accelerate financial deepening.

Women and Climate Stress: Role Reversal from Beneficiaries to Expert Participants

Summary Women, especially in the marginalized communities of the high-risk regions prone to flood and drought are considered most vulnerable to climate change risks. They play a very important role in household nutrition management and resource management in terms of labor, off-farm products, and small savings. In the absence of help from formal and informal R and D and technology institutions, their knowledge and resources’ exchange system has to be very robust to cope with the seasonal shortages arising due to climate fluctuations. The study found that these exchanges, spilling over caste or class boundaries, serve as valuable informal safety nets and contribute to household resilience. Researchers seeking to strengthen community coping strategies should pursue such polices and institutional interventions which strengthen women's resource exchange and exploitation mechanisms. We offer in the end a 4-E model involving exchange, expertise, ethics, and environmental consciousness which describes how these empower women and help in articulation of their unique coping strength at intra- and inert-community levels. Lateral learning among community members sustains and enhances over time collective and household coping strategies with climate risks.

Use of Informal Safety Nets during the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Benefit Cycle: How Poor Families Cope with Within-Month Economic Instability

AbstractPoor families often combine public benefits with social network and community resources to cope with economic instability. This study shows that decisions to combine formal and informal resources are as dynamic as the economic instability they are intended to buffer. Using survey data of poor families receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits in Durham, North Carolina, this study takes advantage of the within-month economic instability created by the SNAP benefit cycle to show how families intentionally combine their formal and informal resources throughout a benefit month. Results show that families receiving SNAP benefits are more likely to borrow money for food 3 weeks after receiving SNAP benefits. Household food insecurity remains stable throughout the SNAP month, suggesting that this use of families’ informal social safety nets may effectively buffer against economic instability.

Expanded Social Protection May Do More Harm Than Good: A Pessimistic Review

AbstractThere is growing interest in expanded social protection programs, even for the poorest countries. Technology now allows cash transfers to be delivered to masses of people with only weak connections to the formal economy. Also there are demonstrated effects of conditional cash transfers in improving aspects of human capital. Yet it is doubtful that social protection programs can provide a floor sufficient to eradicate extreme poverty without harming incentives and without unduly taxing a small minority of highly skilled, and increasingly mobile, workers. Long‐term fiscal obligations from expanded social transfers, potential for distorted work choices, unknown interactions with informal safety nets and difficulties of targeting beneficiaries all suggest grounds for caution.

Food for the Urban Poor: Safety Nets and Food-Based Social Protection in Manzini, Swaziland

This paper aims to contribute to the urban food security debate by exploring the role of informal safety nets and formal food-based social protection in addressing food insecurity challenges facing low-income urban households in Manzini. The empirical data used in this paper came from two surveys: the first involved 500 households and was undertaken in three low-income areas of Manzini. The second involved a series of in-depth interviews with senior staff at supermarkets and spaza shops. The results reveal that food security challenges are considerable in the low-income areas of Manzini and that, at the same time, various forms of community and intra-household food sharing are an important food source for a minority of poor households in the city. In this regard, the national government needs to consider strengthening food-based social safety net programmes that assist poor and vulnerable groups.