The Targeted Social Assistance Program of Georgia is a last resort social program that is considered a best practice among proxy-means-tested (PMT) programs. It achieves high targeting accuracy for a relatively high level poverty incidence. In 2013, the Government of Georgia embarked in the revision of the program to ensure its continuous effectiveness and to revise some of the parameters of the eligibility formula that could be subject to manipulation. In particular, the government was concerned about the subjective evaluation of social agents and about concealable goods. This report assesses the technical work and the policy actions taken by the Georgian government during the last two years. In this way, it covers the full cycle of the reform of a social assistance program, from establishing the objectives to the design of compensation measures to minimize the number of newly ineligible beneficiaries. In particular, it describes the revision of the PMT formula, the introduction of a scheme of benefits that decreases with the score and an associated program for children, the pre-testing of new formula, and the design of compensation measures. The report also includes a chapter with specific recommendations for Georgia to improve the system of social protection and labour.

Gender equality is a core development objective in its own right and also smart development policy and business practice. No society can develop sustainably without giving men and women equal power to shape their own lives and contribute to their families, communities, and countries. And yet, critical gender gaps continue to exist in all countries and across multiple dimensions. The gender module of the World Bank's ADePT software platform produces a comprehensive set of tables and graphs using household surveys to help diagnose and analyse the prevailing gender inequalities at the country level and over time. This book provides a step-by-step guide to the use of the ADePT software and an introduction to its basic economic concepts and econometric methods. The module is organised around the framework proposed by the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and DevelopmentIt covers gender differences in outcomes in three primary dimensions of gender equality: human capital (or endowments), economic opportunities, and voice and agency. Particular focus is given to the analysis and decomposition techniques that allow for further exploring of gender gaps in economic opportunities

The Results-Based Initiatives (RBI), launched in 2007, were a pioneering attempt to provide comprehensive, coherent and rigorous evidence on effective interventions to foster the economic empowerment of women. The RBI comprised five small pilots with built-in impact evaluation designed to identify what works best in promoting better outcomes for women as entrepreneurs, wage earners or farmers, under different country contexts. The programme was an innovative experiment in an important policy area. While there is a clear rationale for policy interventions to help remove constraints to women's economic empowerment, knowledge of what interventions work best in different settings remains limited. When the RBI were conceived, rigorous evidence in this area was close to nonexistent because no systematic impact evaluations had been carried out in developing countries. However, the RBI fell short of meeting several of their ambitious objectives. This study highlights lessons from the RBI with respect to both the impact of the interventions and dos and don'ts in the design and implementation of pilots. Regarding the impact on economic opportunities, the interventions did not generally increase women's earnings, with the exception of the Peru pilot. However, women who received training generally appreciated the access to new information and felt their skills and their involvement in business associations and networks had increased. However, it would be wrong to conclude that these interventions were not effective. The lack of robust positive impact may be due to the evaluations being conducted too soon to show fully the long-term effects of the interventions, or to problems in the design, implementation, or measurement of pilot outcomes. In particular, there was a clear need of an 'early warning system' to synchronise the corrections in the interventions with the design of the impact evaluation. The RBI were overambitious regarding what could be achieved with a limited budget and a short time frame.