Bangladesh’s Primary Education Stipend Program provides stipends for 13 million primary schoolchildren to 10 million mothers. In 2017 the method of payment changed from cash to mobile money. This study considers the experience of the mothers with the shift to mobile money, and to the change in payme...

This study surveys Kenya's electronic payment system for social benefits, Inua Jamii, from the perspective of recipients, including their views on convenience and the benefits from competition. It also considers whether these digital G2P payments programs have increased financial inclusion more gene...

Does channeling government-to-person (G2P) payments through bank accounts encourage financial inclusion and use? This paper explores the factors that have driven the adoption of digital payments in India by beneficiaries of PMGKY, the large-scale COVID-19 relief program launched in May 2020.

India imposed a lock-down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 and began a gradual re-opening in June. A telephonic survey in April examined the early effectiveness of information and the massive PMGKY social protection program (Policy Paper 217). This paper analyzes a second-round sur...

Recent work by the CGD researchers through the COVID-19 Gender and Development Initiative suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted women particularly severely, disproportionately affecting their paid and unpaid work, income, and food security, while also exacerbating the risk of gender-based...

Together with a lockdown and an information campaign, India’s early response to the Covid-19 pandemic included the launch of PMGKY, a major social protection package. This built on previous digital investments including in direct benefit transfer to financial accounts as well as on several establish...

COVID-19 vaccination efforts are well and truly underway across the world. In addition to those in Europe and North America, vaccination campaigns are gathering pace across China, India, Russia, and the Middle East, though lagging in many other, mostly poor, countries. As more start scaling up their...