The World Bank, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) designed a research program addressing how to improve education and learning outcomes for forcibly displaced populations and host communities facing poverty and other hardships. The World Bank contracted AIR ...
In 2010, the government of the Republic of Zambia implemented the Child Grant cash transfer program, the results of which offer evidence that small-scale cash transfers to poor rural households with young children can stimulate economic activity while alleviating poverty. Building on this, in 2011, the Zambian government—through the Ministry ...
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are bringing about a paradigm shift in what it means to be a reader, and in how education systems must be restructured to support children’s acquisition of comprehension and critical reading skills. AIR is providing the Ministry of Education in each country with a set of measurable, ...
Alignment between apprenticeship and workforce development systems benefits both systems, as well as their business and job seeker customers. This brief identifies the key dimensions of alignment, shares promising practices, and provides a checklist to assess and strengthen alignment.
The First 1,000 Most Critical Days Program was designed to offer mothers and babies in Zambia a suite of interventions to improve their health and development. This report is the result of an evaluation of the efficacy of this program.
The relationship between happiness and income has been at the center of a vibrant debate, as emotional states are an important determinant of health and social behavior. This study investigated whether a government-run unconditional cash transfer paid directly to women in poor households had an impact on self-reported happiness. ...
Mary Kay Dugan is a managing technical assistant consultant at AIR. She is passionate about identifying evidence-based promising practices and translating them into policies and effective programs focused on underserved populations including disadvantaged youth and young adults. Dugan has over 30 years of experience helping federal, state, and local governments ...
Large numbers of Zambian children suffer from nutrition-related disorders such as low birth weight, wasting, being underweight, chronic malnutrition, and various nutrient deficiencies. AIR and its partners are evaluating the First 1000 Most Critical Days Program, which addresses these issues by targeting households with pregnant women or children under two ...
Jonathan A. Simonetta is Vice President, International Development at AIR. As Vice President, he mentors researchers, oversees projects, monitors overall project performance, and leads business development for our International Development Division.
Despite high levels of knowledge, HIV incidence does not seem to be decreasing among adolescents in Zambia. Girls are much more likely to be infected than boys and intergenerational sex, transactional sex, and multiple concurrent partnerships are normalized. The education sector is struggling to implement effective HIV prevention. The Community ...