The study, led by Mizanur Rahman and colleagues, is notable for its sheer scale. The National Survey on Persons with Disabilities was designed to provide population-level estimates rather than the small clinic-based or district-level samples that have dominated the literature on disability in South Asia. By analysing data across individual, household, and community levels, the researchers were able to apply multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression, a statistical approach that accounts for the fact that people are nested within households and communities and that risk factors operate at each of these layers simultaneously. Crucially, they stratified their models by age, analysing children aged 0 to 17 years separately from adults aged 18 to 95, because the biology and social context of disability differ profoundly between these groups.

The headline number, a national disability prevalence of 2.79 percent with a 95 percent confidence interval of 2.69 to 2.91, is lower than estimates from some international organisations, which have suggested that roughly 15 percent of the world’s population lives with some form of disability. That gap almost certainly reflects differences in definition and measurement rather than any genuine scarcity of impairment in Bangladesh. Survey instruments that rely on self-report or household reporting tend to capture moderate and severe functional limitations while missing many milder impairments, and stigma can suppress disclosure, particularly for intellectual and psychosocial disabilities. Even so, the survey’s consistency and size make the 2.79 percent figure an important benchmark, and the patterns within it are arguably more informative than the headline rate itself.

Physical disability dominated the profile, accounting for 42.44 percent of reported cases, followed by visual impairment at 14.11 percent. Notably, 11.60 percent of people with disabilities reported multiple disabilities, a detail with significant implications for service design. A person with both a physical impairment and a visual one faces compounded barriers to education, employment, and health care, and rehabilitation programmes built around a single impairment category may fail such individuals entirely. The prominence of physical and visual disabilities also points toward preventable causes, including injuries, untreated infections, and age-related conditions, that could be addressed through stronger primary care, occupational safety, and eye health services.

One of the most striking findings concerns sex. Overall, disability was more prevalent among males, but this aggregate picture concealed sharply divergent patterns by age. Among children, girls had 31 percent higher adjusted odds of disability than boys, with an adjusted odds ratio of 1.31 and a confidence interval of 1.13 to 1.52. Among adults, however, no significant sex difference emerged, with an adjusted odds ratio of 1.06 and a confidence interval spanning 0.95 to 1.19. The childhood pattern is particularly concerning in a country where daughters have historically faced disadvantages in nutrition, health care utilisation, and educational investment. Higher odds of reported disability among girls may reflect genuine biological or perinatal differences, but they may also signal that families are more likely to identify and report disability in girls in certain contexts, or conversely that girls with disabilities face compounded neglect. Disentangling these mechanisms is a priority for follow-up research.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive result is the relationship between socioeconomic status and disability. In both age groups, the odds of reporting disability increased with years of schooling and household wealth, the opposite of what a purely causal reading of poverty and impairment might predict. Among adults, community-level literacy was likewise associated with higher odds of disability, while among children the association was reversed, with higher community literacy linked to lower odds. The most plausible explanation is detection bias: wealthier, better-educated households are more aware of what constitutes a disability, more willing to report it to surveyors, and more likely to have accessed diagnostic services, while stigma and limited awareness suppress reporting in poorer and less literate communities. If that interpretation is correct, the true burden of disability in Bangladesh’s most disadvantaged communities is likely substantially higher than the survey suggests, and the observed socioeconomic gradient is a map of underreporting rather than of genuine protection.

Occupational patterns among adults reinforce this interpretive caution. Housewives, students, and blue-collar workers all showed higher adjusted odds of disability than agriculture workers, the reference category. Each of these comparisons can be read in multiple ways. Blue-collar workers may face genuinely elevated risk through hazardous working conditions and injuries, a finding consistent with occupational health research across South Asia. Housewives and students, by contrast, are categories whose composition differs systematically by wealth and education, so the elevated odds may partly reflect reporting behaviour rather than causation. Agriculture workers, who form the reference group, are often among the poorest and least educated, meaning that unmeasured impairment in this group could deflate the apparent risk elsewhere. The authors’ call for caution in interpreting these associations is well founded.

The policy implications of the study are concrete. Rahman and colleagues argue for strengthening community-based disability identification and referral through Bangladesh’s existing primary health-care infrastructure, with particular attention to underserved populations and geographic areas where detection is likely weakest. Bangladesh has an extensive network of community clinics and frontline health workers, and embedding disability screening within routine maternal, child health, and general primary care contacts could dramatically improve case finding without requiring new infrastructure. The researchers also highlight the potential of better coordination between the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, which controls health services, and the Department of Social Services, which administers disability allowances, rehabilitation programmes, and assistive-device distribution. In practice, many Bangladeshis who are identified with a disability never connect to the social protection schemes designed for them, and the study suggests that closing this administrative gap could deliver immediate benefits.

For a country that has made significant progress on poverty reduction, immunisation, and maternal mortality, the persistence of an invisible disability burden represents both a challenge and an opportunity. The 2021 National Survey on Persons with Disabilities provides the statistical foundation that advocates, planners, and researchers have long lacked, and its stratified, multilevel design offers a template for other low- and middle-income countries attempting similar measurement exercises. The paradoxes it documents, from higher reported disability among wealthier households to the reversal of the literacy association between children and adults, are not statistical curiosities. They are warnings that the data we see are shaped by who gets counted, and that the children and adults least likely to appear in disability statistics may be those most in need of services. Turning a 2.79 percent snapshot into a genuinely inclusive national response will require Bangladesh to treat detection itself as a public health intervention.

Subject of Research: National prevalence and sociodemographic correlates of disability in Bangladesh based on the 2021 National Survey on Persons with Disabilities

Article Title: National burden of disabilities in Bangladesh and its socio-demographic correlates: A 2021 cross-sectional analysis

Article References: National burden of disabilities in Bangladesh and its socio-demographic correlates: A 2021 cross-sectional analysis. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0007463

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0007463

Keywords: disability, Bangladesh, public health, prevalence, cross-sectional study, multilevel regression, health equity, primary health care, social protection, visual impairment, physical disability, LMICs

The research, conducted by Dr. Taiwon Ha, an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at Pusan National University, examined detailed Korean household data to test how equivalence scales shift depending on who lives in a household and what that household consumes. The study was made available online on July 8, 2026, and published in the journal Asia Pacific Viewpoint. Its central conclusion is deceptively simple but potentially consequential for policy: equivalence scales should not be treated as one-size-fits-all constants, because household needs vary systematically with composition, consumption type, and the specific objective of the benefit program being designed. A scale that works reasonably well for setting a general poverty line may misallocate resources when applied to education support or housing assistance.

Equivalence scales sit quietly at the foundation of most modern welfare states. When a government decides how much income support a family of four should receive relative to a single adult, or where to draw the income eligibility line for subsidized services, it is implicitly using such a scale. The most widely recognized benchmark is the old OECD scale, which assigns a weight of 1.0 to the first adult, 0.5 to each additional adult, and 0.3 to each child, reflecting the assumption that shared living produces economies of scale. These weights encode decades of accumulated judgment, but they were never derived from a single definitive empirical exercise, and they were calibrated for particular policy contexts in particular countries. Whether they accurately describe the needs of households in a different economy—such as South Korea’s, with its distinctive patterns of private education spending and multigenerational living—is precisely the kind of question Dr. Ha’s study set out to answer empirically rather than by convention.

The empirical results challenge the standard benchmark in several directions. The estimated equivalence scales from the Korean data were generally smaller than the old OECD scale, meaning that the actual additional income households need as they grow appears to be lower than the conventional weights imply. In other words, economies of scale within households may be stronger than the standard adjustment assumes, and applying the OECD benchmark could overstate the resources required by larger families relative to smaller ones. At the same time, the study found that additional adults generally required greater weights than additional children, consistent with the observation that adults command more of the household budget through their own consumption, work-related expenses, and personal needs, while children’s costs are more concentrated in specific categories.

That last qualification turned out to be one of the study’s most striking findings. Education expenditure emerged as a major exception to the general pattern: in this category, children generated relatively greater additional needs than adults. This is particularly significant in the Korean context, where private spending on education is among the highest in the world and where families with school-age children face substantial, largely non-negotiable costs. A welfare system that treats children as uniformly cheaper to support than adults will systematically understate the burden on families whose budgets are dominated by schooling. The implication is that the correct weight for a child depends on which part of the household budget the policy is trying to protect—a single scale cannot serve both a general minimum-income calculation and an education-specific benefit.

The type of consumption mattered in a second dimension as well. The study distinguished between shareable and non-shareable goods and found that non-shareable goods, such as food, which must largely be consumed individually, were associated with larger equivalence scales than shareable goods, such as housing. The economics are straightforward: when two people move in together, they can heat one home instead of two and buy one refrigerator, but they cannot split a single meal into two adequate dinners. Because the scope for sharing varies across categories of spending, the overall equivalence scale for a household depends on the composition of its consumption basket. A household whose budget is weighted toward food and other individually consumed necessities needs proportionally more additional income than a household of the same size whose spending is dominated by shareable items.

These findings arrive at a moment when the architecture of minimum-income protection is under active scrutiny. In South Korea, the National Basic Livelihood Security system sets standards that serve as benchmarks for a wide range of welfare benefits, and its income thresholds determine who qualifies for support and at what level. The study suggests that policymakers could move toward more differentiated equivalence scales when determining eligibility and benefit amounts. Minimum-income programs, for example, might assign greater weight to adults, reflecting their larger general consumption needs, while education-related assistance could better reflect the substantial costs that children impose in that specific domain. More broadly, the research argues that the appropriate equivalence scale is not a property of the household alone but of the match between household characteristics and the objective of the benefit program—meaning that different programs can legitimately use different scales for the same family.

The methodological significance of the work lies in its demonstration of heterogeneity. Rather than estimating a single equivalence scale and reporting it as a fixed parameter, the analysis shows that empirical scales vary across household compositions and consumption categories in patterned, interpretable ways. This matters because errors in equivalence scales propagate through entire benefit systems. If a scale understates the needs of families with children in education-heavy economies, those families will be undercompensated and may fail to qualify for support they genuinely require. If a scale overstates the needs of larger households in general, resources flow toward households whose living arrangements already generate savings, diluting the targeting of limited fiscal space. Refining the scales is therefore not a technical nicety but a question of distributional fairness and fiscal efficiency simultaneously.

Dr. Ha brings an unusual combination of experience to the question. Before joining academia, he spent nearly two decades in professional roles at Korea’s Ministry of Economy and Finance, Statistics Korea, and the United Nations, and his research focuses on welfare and social policy, labor markets, economic shocks, policy evaluation, and applied microeconometrics, with particular attention to heterogeneous policy effects. That background shows in the study’s orientation: the goal is not only to estimate parameters but to provide practical evidence that can be translated into the design of a more responsive social protection system. The author declared no conflicts of interest in connection with the publication.

The study’s closing message is captured in Dr. Ha’s own summary of the work: one size does not fit all when it comes to household income needs, and the hope is that the research provides practical evidence for designing a social protection system that better reflects household differences and directs support to those who need it most. For welfare states everywhere, the lesson generalizes beyond Korea. Every country that adjusts benefits for household size is making an implicit claim about how needs scale with people, and the evidence now suggests those claims should be tested against data on what households actually consume, who lives under the same roof, and what each program is trying to achieve. Precision in these adjustments could mean the difference between a safety net that catches the families who are genuinely stretched and one that misses them while supporting households that are already managing.

Subject of Research: Equivalence scales and household income needs assessment for public welfare transfer programs

Article Title: Pusan National University study rethinks how household income needs are assessed for welfare support

Article References: Pusan National University study rethinks how household income needs are assessed for welfare support. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: equivalence scales, welfare policy, household income, minimum-income protection, public transfers, Pusan National University, South Korea, consumption sharing, education expenditure, National Basic Livelihood Security, social protection, poverty measurement

The analytical foundation of the report is the Global MPI, an index built from ten indicators spanning three dimensions: health, education, and living standards. A household is classified as multidimensionally poor if it is deprived in at least a third of these ten indicators. What distinguishes the new study is its pairing of this household-level measure with individual-level data on children themselves, specifically their nutritional status and school attendance. This is the first global multidimensional study of children’s experiences of poverty within the home based on observed household survey data, covering 97 countries for undernutrition and 108 countries for school attendance. By linking individual and household deprivations, the researchers can quantify not just how many children are deprived, but how many deprivations each child carries simultaneously.

The headline numbers are stark. Across the 97 countries with available nutrition data, covering 518 million children under five, roughly one-third are undernourished, meaning they are either stunted or underweight. Globally, 96 million undernourished children also live in multidimensional poverty, equivalent to one in five children in the surveyed population. Perhaps most striking is the intensity of deprivation among this doubly disadvantaged group: each multidimensionally poor and undernourished child experiences, on average, four to five additional deprivations beyond undernutrition itself, whether in access to clean cooking fuel, safe drinking water, sanitation, electricity, schooling, or housing. Deprivation, the data suggest, rarely travels alone.

The schooling picture follows a similar pattern. Across 108 countries with available data, 13 percent of the 1.04 billion school-aged children are out of school, a total of 136 million children. More than 80 percent of all out-of-school children are also multidimensionally poor, numbering 110 million. Each poor out-of-school child experiences an average of five additional deprivations across the other nine Global MPI indicators. Taken together, 31 percent of the 1.04 billion school-aged children covered by the study are out of school, multidimensionally poor, or both. Sabina Alkire, Director of OPHI and co-author of the study, said she was shocked by how tightly clustered the intensity of poverty is for children, noting that the data reaffirm the need for multisectoral approaches to development programmes such as social protection.

One of the report’s most methodologically significant findings concerns inequality within households. Rather than assuming that all children in a poor household share the same disadvantages, the researchers examined whether deprivation is distributed evenly among siblings. It is not. Over one-third of poor children under five live in a household in which at least one child is undernourished while another is not. Similarly, over one-third of poor children live in households where some school-aged children attend school and others do not. This intra-household variation, documented at global scale for the first time, carries a pointed implication for programme design: interventions that treat the household as a uniform unit of disadvantage may miss children whose needs are invisible in aggregate statistics.

The report also paints a stark picture of women’s educational disadvantage and its relationship to child outcomes. In multidimensionally poor homes, over two-thirds of poor children, whether well-nourished or undernourished, live in a household where no woman has completed six years of schooling. By comparison, just over half live in households where no man has reached the same level of education. The gap widens further among poor children who are out of school: around 82 percent of poor out-of-school children live in households where no woman has completed six years of schooling, compared with 62 percent for households without a man who has reached that threshold. The association between maternal education and child outcomes has long been established in development research, but these figures quantify its scale across the developing world with unusual precision.

Gender disparities in school attendance vary considerably across countries, even though globally more girls than boys are out of school and more boys than girls are undernourished. In 19 countries, which together account for 56 percent of all out-of-school children, girls face higher rates of school exclusion than boys. The largest gaps appear in Afghanistan, where 67 percent of girls are out of school compared with 47 percent of boys, a difference of 20 percentage points. Pakistan follows, with 30.2 percent of girls out of school against 22.3 percent of boys, then the Central African Republic at 29.3 percent versus 21.5 percent, and Guinea at 41.3 percent versus 33.7 percent. These national-level contrasts illustrate how the same global phenomenon can be driven by very different local dynamics.

Amid the deprivation data, the report identifies a genuinely hopeful trend: pioneer children, defined as children aged 10 to 17 who are the only members of their household to have completed six years of schooling. Across the 108 countries studied, 71 million children fit this description. Half of them, 35 million, live in South Asia, where one in nine children aged 10 to 17 is a pioneer. By country, 28 million pioneer children live in India, over 3 million in Bangladesh, 2 million in Pakistan, 837,000 in Nepal, and 508,500 in Afghanistan. Notably, India, Bhutan, and Bangladesh all have higher shares of pioneer girls among girls aged 10 to 17 than pioneer boys among boys of the same age. Only in Afghanistan are pioneer boys more prevalent, at 7 percent of boys versus 4 percent of girls, and half of Afghanistan’s pioneer children are also multidimensionally poor.

The pioneer phenomenon is not without its complications. Globally, 9 percent of pioneer children live in homes where at least one other school-aged child remains out of school, a reminder that even households producing a first-generation learner can still contain children excluded from education. The researchers argue that supporting these young people, who are already breaking intergenerational cycles of low schooling, could mobilise significant change, particularly if programmes recognise the uneven distribution of educational opportunity within the very households that produce pioneers.

Alkire framed the report as a demonstration of what existing data can achieve when individual and household measurements are combined. This is the first study, she said, that shows at scale the possibility and importance of using existing individual data alongside household data to inform evidence-based programmes that meaningfully address cycles of poverty seeded by undernourished and out-of-school children. Invoking the economist Amartya Sen’s insight that nutrition and schooling carry both instrumental and intrinsic value, she called for collaborative work at the local level in measurement and policy to address the systemic deprivations that threaten to trap generations of children in poverty. For policymakers, the report’s central message is that child poverty is not a single problem but a dense web of overlapping deprivations, and that dismantling it requires interventions designed for the way disadvantage actually accumulates within homes.

Subject of Research: Multidimensional child poverty and undernutrition in developing countries

Article Title: 252 million young children in developing countries are undernourished, multidimensionally poor, or both, new global study finds

Article References: 252 million young children in developing countries are undernourished, multidimensionally poor, or both, new global study finds. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: child poverty, multidimensional poverty, undernutrition, Global MPI, school attendance, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, intra-household inequality, girls' education, South Asia, social protection, stunting, pioneer children

The answer, according to the data, lies in an uneven landscape of knowledge, skills, and access. Vendors demonstrated moderate awareness of decent work principles, with 55 percent falling into the moderate knowledge category, while 23 percent showed low knowledge and only 22 percent high knowledge. This means that although most vendors have some grasp of concepts such as fair pay, workplace rights, social protection, and safe working conditions, that awareness rarely runs deep enough to be actionable. In practical terms, a vendor may know that labour rights exist without knowing how to claim them, or understand that social protection is important without knowing how to enrol in a programme. The study’s author argues that this shallow but real awareness constrains vendors’ capability to recognise and seize opportunities, leaving them unable to engage effectively with the formal systems that could improve their working lives.

Where the vendors truly shine is in operational competence. A striking 92 percent reported strong practical vending skills, and 87 percent claimed solid customer service abilities, while 66 percent possessed basic financial management skills. These figures reflect a workforce that has learned its trade through experience rather than formal instruction, honing food-handling techniques, market adaptability, and interpersonal finesse through years of daily practice. Yet the skills profile collapses when the focus shifts from the stall to the business. Only 40 percent demonstrated awareness of labour rights, just 38 percent could maintain proper records, and a mere 29 percent reported competence in sustainable business practices. This gap between operational and strategic skills is critical, because record-keeping and regulatory literacy are precisely the capabilities that allow small enterprises to grow, secure credit, and formalise their operations.

Access to enabling services proved to be the weakest link of all. Only 27 percent of vendors had access to formal financial services such as banks or loans, a mere 25 percent had participated in any training or workshops, and just 18 percent were covered by any form of formal social protection. Instead, the dominant source of support was informal: 69 percent of vendors relied on family and friends when they needed help. From the perspective of the Capability Approach, this pattern reveals vendors adapting to inadequate environments by leaning on available social resources rather than formal systems. Such networks provide short-term relief, but they rarely support substantial economic growth, and this reliance can actually extend vulnerability by keeping vendors locked out of scalable financial services and safety nets that could buffer them against illness, theft, weather, or sudden losses of vending space.

The statistical heart of the study lies in its chi-square analyses of the relationships among knowledge, skills, and service access. Two associations emerged as statistically significant. First, knowledge and skills were linked, with a chi-square value of 6.41, a p-value of 0.041, and a small-to-moderate effect size indicated by Cramér’s V of 0.29. Vendors with high knowledge were disproportionately likely to demonstrate high skills: within the high-knowledge group, 10 of 17 vendors showed high skill levels, whereas in the low-knowledge group only 5 of 18 did. Second, skills and access to formal services were significantly associated, with a chi-square value of 3.92, a p-value of 0.048, and Cramér’s V of 0.23. Among vendors with low to moderate skills, only 34.6 percent accessed formal services, compared with 56.0 percent of highly skilled vendors. The interpretation offered is that skills in financial management and documentation likely reduce transaction costs and foster smoother interactions with formal institutions such as banks and municipal offices.

Intriguingly, the relationship between knowledge and service access, while showing a clear gradient, did not reach statistical significance. Access rose from 33.3 percent among low-knowledge vendors to 38.1 percent among those with moderate knowledge and 58.8 percent among the high-knowledge group, yet the association yielded a p-value of 0.087, just above the conventional significance threshold, with Cramér’s V of 0.25. The author reads this as evidence that awareness alone does not guarantee inclusion. Structural barriers such as high costs, bureaucratic hurdles, and a lack of institutional trust can exclude even well-informed vendors from services they know exist. This distinction between internal capabilities, such as knowledge, and external enabling conditions is a core insight of the Capability Approach: recognising an opportunity is not the same as being able to convert it into a real outcome when the surrounding institutional environment is hostile or unresponsive.

The demographic profile of the surveyed vendors adds important context to these findings. Women made up the majority of respondents at 56 percent, and the largest age bracket was 26 to 35 years, accounting for 42 percent of the sample, followed by 36 to 45 years at 27 percent. Nearly half of the vendors, 48 percent, had completed secondary school, while 31 percent had primary education, 12 percent had tertiary education, and 9 percent had no schooling. Most vendors, 52 percent, had between one and five years of experience, suggesting a steady influx of newcomers into the trade. The author interprets this pattern as a symptom of chronic structural unemployment: as formal jobs fail to materialise for Tanzania’s rapidly growing urban population, food vending becomes a default livelihood for people in their prime working years. New entrants often lack the capital and resilience of established vendors, raising concerns about income stability and long-term security.

The study is careful to acknowledge its own limits. It employed a cross-sectional quantitative design, collecting data at a single point in time from a convenience sample of 77 vendors at one location, which means the findings cannot establish causality and may not generalise to vendors in other municipalities or socio-economic contexts. Self-reported questionnaire data are also susceptible to recall and social desirability biases. The author explicitly cautions that the significant associations between knowledge and skills, and between skills and service access, should be viewed as correlations rather than causal relationships. It is plausible that the two constructs influence each other over time, with knowledge enabling better skill development and practical experience deepening understanding, but longitudinal research would be needed to untangle the direction of these effects.

Even with those caveats, the policy implications are concrete and urgent. The study recommends that municipal authorities prioritise inclusive training programmes covering labour rights, financial education, record-keeping, and business skills, precisely the strategic competencies in which vendors showed the greatest deficits. It further calls for cooperation among local government, banks, and other institutions to expand formal assistance, and for authorities to formally recognise the contributions of informal food vendors to urban economies and food security while working to make their working conditions safer and more secure. Within the ILO framework, the findings expose gaps across multiple pillars at once: rights at work are undermined by shallow legal knowledge, productive employment is weakened by missing managerial skills, and social protection is hollowed out by 18 percent coverage rates. Viewed through the lens of the Capability Approach, the vendors of Kigamboni possess the agency and the craft, but the conversion factors that would turn their efforts into genuine freedoms, from credit to insurance to institutional recognition, remain largely out of reach. Closing that gap, the study argues, is not charity but sound economic policy for cities where the informal sector is not the margin of the economy but its beating heart.

Subject of Research: Decent work capabilities of informal street food vendors in Kigamboni Municipality, Tanzania

Article Title: Capabilities of informal food vendors in achieving decent work in Kigamboni Municipality, Tanzania

Article References: Capabilities of informal food vendors in achieving decent work in Kigamboni Municipality, Tanzania. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00569-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00569-2

Keywords: informal economy, decent work, street food vendors, Tanzania, Capability Approach, ILO, social protection, urban livelihoods, financial inclusion, labour rights, Kigamboni, skills training

The research team, led by Charles Kwofie of the University of Energy and Natural Resources with colleagues from the University of Ghana and the University of Professional Studies, used a technique known as a discrete choice experiment to probe the preferences of 150 informal sector workers in the Accra Metropolis. Rather than simply asking people whether they would like a pension, the method presents respondents with pairs of hypothetical schemes that differ across several attributes and asks them to choose between each pair. Because every choice involves a trade-off, the researchers can recover the hidden weight that each worker places on individual scheme features, from the size of the contribution to the identity of the fund manager.

The intellectual foundations of the approach stretch back decades. Kevin Lancaster’s characteristics theory of value holds that consumers derive utility not from goods as whole bundles but from the attributes those goods possess, while Daniel McFadden’s random utility theory provides the statistical machinery for modelling choices made under uncertainty. In this framework, the utility a respondent assigns to any pension scheme is decomposed into an observable component driven by the attributes and an unobservable random component. The probability of choosing one scheme over another can then be estimated, in this case with a conditional logit model applied to an impressive 8,400 choice observations generated by 150 respondents each completing 28 binary choice sets.

The four attributes at the heart of the experiment were chosen through a rigorous three-stage process. A review of the informal pension and choice experiment literature identified candidate features known to drive demand, namely cost, benefit structure, payment flexibility and the identity of the scheme administrator. These were refined through consultation with two actuarial and pension specialists and a review of the design of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust’s third-tier Personal Pension Scheme, established under the National Pensions Act of 2008. Finally, a pilot with fifteen respondents from the target population confirmed that the wording was understood and the levels were realistic before the main survey began.

The headline findings are striking. Informal sector workers strongly prefer pension schemes managed by private trustees over those managed by government entities, with the aversion to government management amounting to roughly 53 percent of the utility swing associated with contribution affordability. They also want flexibility in how often they pay, reflecting the irregular and seasonal nature of informal incomes, and they favour affordable contributions over expensive ones. Perhaps most tellingly, the workers chose defined benefit plans over defined contribution plans, signalling that they value certainty about what they will eventually receive more than the prospect of higher but uncertain returns. The full preferred bundle corresponds to an estimated willingness to pay of about 31.43 Ghanaian cedis per member per month, or roughly 37.7 million cedis annually for every 100,000 enrolees.

The statistical evidence behind these conclusions is robust. The conditional logit model produced a chi-square statistic of 972.15 with a p-value at or below 0.001, and all four attributes were statistically significant. The sample size comfortably exceeded the minimum threshold of 55 respondents derived from standard stated-preference formulas, and the two-alternative design required at least 100 decision-makers in total, a bar the study cleared with room to spare. Ethical approval was obtained from the Committee for Human Research and Ethics of the University of Energy and Natural Resources, and all participants gave informed consent before data collection.

When the researchers disaggregated the results by gender, they found that men and women share the same ordering of preferences but differ in intensity. Female respondents, who made up 20 percent of the sample, were less sensitive to an expensive contribution amount than their male counterparts, with coefficients of negative 0.52 versus negative 1.02, suggesting that women are willing to commit a greater share of their income to a scheme they trust. Women also showed a stronger aversion to government fund managers and a stronger preference for defined benefits, indicating greater risk aversion and a higher value placed on benefit certainty. The authors caution, however, that the female estimates rest on only 30 respondents and should be read as indicative rather than conclusive, since women are widely reported to account for a large share of informal sector employment in Ghana.

Education told an equally revealing story. Respondents with no formal education, who constituted 51 percent of the sample, were the most sensitive to contribution costs, with a coefficient approaching negative 1.28, while sensitivity declined steadily among those with senior high school and tertiary education. A plausible explanation is that workers with lower educational attainment typically earn lower and less predictable incomes, so any given contribution represents a larger slice of their earnings. The least educated group also showed the strongest aversion to government-managed funds, at roughly negative 0.66 compared with about negative 0.29 among the tertiary educated, hinting that greater financial literacy softens distrust of public institutions. Even the most educated respondents, however, still preferred defined benefits, underscoring how central certainty is across the entire spectrum.

The practical implications for Ghana’s pension architecture are considerable. The third-tier scheme created under Act 766 already relies on licensed private trustees and pension fund managers, a structure that aligns closely with what informal workers say they want. The findings also support product designs built around mobile-money platforms that enable micro-contributions, several of which are being piloted across other African countries, since flexible payment schedules match the volatile cash flows of petty traders and artisans far better than rigid monthly instalments. A hybrid product combining affordable contributions with higher returns delivered with certainty emerges from the analysis as the ideal target, one that would also be financially sustainable for providers.

The study arrives at a politically charged moment. After the December 2024 general elections, Ghana’s governing party has intensively championed pension contributions among informal sector workers, and a proposed pension product for cocoa farmers, announced in the 2018 budget, has completed preparatory work but has yet to be implemented. By quantifying the specific attributes that drive willingness to contribute, the research offers SSNIT, the National Pensions Regulatory Authority, private trustees and fund managers actionable guidance on the scheme features most likely to attract enrolment. The authors also frame an agenda for future work, asking how preferences vary by income and location, whether specifying contributions directly in cedis would change the valuations, how funding and longevity risks can be reconciled with the demand for defined benefits, and whether behavioural factors such as trust, financial literacy and mobile-money convenience can be integrated into stated-preference models. For a sector where the majority of the workforce operates outside formal social protection, the answers could shape the retirement security of millions.

Subject of Research: Willingness to pay for pension contributions among informal sector workers in Ghana using a discrete choice experiment

Article Title: Using discrete choice experiment to investigate willingness to pay for pension contributions in the informal sector of Ghana

Article References: Kwofie, C., Nortey, E. N. N., Tetteh, B. N. A., & Kumi, W. (2026). Using discrete choice experiment to investigate willingness to pay for pension contributions in the informal sector of Ghana. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 229. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00574-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00574-5

Keywords: pension, informal sector, Ghana, discrete choice experiment, willingness to pay, conditional logit, SSNIT, defined benefit, fund managers, social protection, random utility theory, Accra

The study’s methodological approach is as important as its findings. Mpofu and Moyo conducted in-depth interviews with 20 children aged between 10 and 18 years, alongside 10 grandparent caregivers, using a phenomenological design that seeks to understand how people interpret and make meaning of their own everyday experiences. Rather than measuring outcomes through standardized instruments, the researchers asked children to describe their daily lives, their relationships, their worries, and their sources of joy in their own words. The analytical framework was Ecological Systems Theory, the influential model developed by developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, which holds that a child’s development unfolds across nested layers of context, from the immediate microsystem of family and household, through the mesosystem of connections between those settings, to the exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem of institutions, cultural values, and historical change.

What emerged from the interviews is a strikingly paradoxical picture of childhood. On one side of the paradox lies profound emotional security. Children consistently described their relationships with their grandparents as sources of care, warmth, and belonging, describing bonds of attachment and trust that anchored their sense of identity and worth. Grandparents, for their part, spoke of deep commitment to the children in their charge, framing their caregiving as both a moral duty and an expression of love. In a research literature that has often emphasized the burdens carried by elderly caregivers, this finding is a corrective: the grandchild-grandparent relationship, in these households, functions as a genuine emotional resource for both generations, a relational microsystem that buffers children against the losses and disruptions that brought them into their grandparents’ care in the first place.

The other side of the paradox is structural vulnerability, and it is severe. Children reported chronic poverty and food insecurity as defining features of their daily lives, with hunger shaping everything from their concentration at school to their energy for household tasks. Schooling was frequently disrupted, whether through inability to pay fees, the need to work, or the simple exhaustion of children stretched beyond their years. Many described assuming adult responsibilities early, taking on caregiving, agricultural labor, and income-generating work that would ordinarily fall to parents. The study also documents heightened gendered risks, particularly in mining communities, where girls face elevated exposure to exploitation and danger. These are not incidental hardships; the researchers show how they are co-produced by the wider systems surrounding the household, from national economic collapse to local labor markets, exactly as Ecological Systems Theory would predict.

The gendered dimension of vulnerability deserves particular attention. In communities where artisanal and small-scale mining activity draws migrants and money, the study found that children, and especially girls, navigate risks that their grandparents are often too old, too distant, or too constrained to monitor or mitigate. This finding connects the intimate microsystem of the grandparent-headed home directly to the exosystem of economic activity that children do not control but must nevertheless survive. It also illustrates why the researchers argue that resilience and vulnerability are co-constructed across relational, institutional, and structural contexts: the same child can be deeply loved and protected at home while remaining acutely exposed beyond it, and no single level of intervention can address both realities at once.

Yet the story the children and grandparents tell is not one of passive suffering. The study documents a repertoire of resilience strategies operating at multiple ecological levels. Within households, grandparents and children developed livelihood strategies to stretch scarce resources, combining subsistence farming, petty trading, and piecework. Kinship ties beyond the household provided crucial support, with extended family members stepping in with food, school fees, or labor when the core household could not cope. At the community level, neighbors and local institutions offered forms of mutual aid, while non-governmental organizations supplied material assistance and programs that reached skipped-generation families directly. These findings map neatly onto the mesosystem and exosystem layers of Bronfenbrenner’s model, demonstrating empirically how support flows, or fails to flow, across the boundaries between family, community, and institution.

The theoretical contribution of the study lies in this multi-level demonstration. Much of the existing scholarship on grandparent caregiving in sub-Saharan Africa, the authors note, has centered on the burdens faced by elderly caregivers: their health problems, their poverty, their grief. By foregrounding children’s voices, Mpofu and Moyo shift the analytical lens and reveal that children are not merely recipients of care or victims of circumstance but active interpreters and navigators of their worlds. Children in the study described how they made sense of their parents’ absence, how they weighed pride in their grandparents against embarrassment about their poverty, and how they strategized to keep themselves in school. This agency-centered perspective aligns with contemporary developmental science, which increasingly treats children as competent social actors whose subjective experience is essential data rather than background noise.

The policy implications are concrete. The authors argue for child-centred social protection that goes beyond generic household transfers to address the specific needs of skipped-generation families: support that recognizes that caregivers are elderly and often infirm, that children shoulder adult burdens, and that educational costs are the mechanism through which poverty most directly converts into lifelong disadvantage. They call for interventions that strengthen both material support and psychosocial well-being, pairing school-fee assistance and food security programs with counseling and mentorship that address the emotional complexities of parental absence. The gendered risks identified in mining communities suggest the need for targeted protective measures rather than one-size-fits-all programming. Because the study is grounded in Ecological Systems Theory, its recommendations are deliberately multi-level, targeting the relational, institutional, and structural contexts simultaneously rather than expecting grandparents alone to solve problems that originate far beyond the household.

For a global audience, the Nkayi findings resonate far beyond Zimbabwe. Grandparent-headed households are rising across much of sub-Saharan Africa in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and continuing labor migration, and similar skipped-generation arrangements are increasingly common in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and among migrant communities in high-income countries, where parents leave children with grandparents while seeking work abroad. The Zimbabwean study offers a template for how to study these families: listen to the children, situate the household within its nested contexts, and resist the temptation to reduce complex lives to either tragedy or triumph. The paradox the researchers document, of emotional richness coexisting with material deprivation, is likely the defining feature of skipped-generation childhood wherever it occurs, and policies that address only one side of that paradox will fail the children they are meant to serve.

The study, which received ethical approval from the Zimbabwe Open University Research Ethics Committee and obtained informed consent from guardians and assent from all child participants, was published open access, making the full account of these children’s experiences freely available to researchers, policymakers, and communities. Its publication comes at a moment when social protection systems across the region are being rethought in the wake of successive economic shocks. If the voices of Nkayi’s children are heeded, the lesson is clear: grandparental love is a powerful foundation for a child’s development, but love alone cannot pay school fees, fill an empty plate, or make a mining town safe for a twelve-year-old girl. Building childhoods that are both emotionally secure and materially protected requires strengthening every ring of the ecological system that surrounds them.

Subject of Research: The lived experiences of children raised in grandparent-headed households in rural Zimbabwe

Article Title: Exploring the lived experiences of children raised by grandparents in Nkayi District, Zimbabwe

Article References: Mpofu, P., & Moyo, M. (2026). Exploring the lived experiences of children raised by grandparents in Nkayi District, Zimbabwe. Discover Social Science and Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00446-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00446-y

Keywords: grandparent-headed households, child welfare, kinship caregiving, Ecological Systems Theory, rural Zimbabwe, orphaned and vulnerable children, intergenerational support, food insecurity, qualitative phenomenology, socio-emotional development, social protection, Nkayi District

The research team examined twenty-two states across the MENA region, from the wealthy Gulf Cooperation Council monarchies to middle-income countries such as Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, and to fragile or conflict-affected settings including Yemen, Syria and the West Bank and Gaza. Drawing on demographic, economic and labour indicators from global datasets compiled by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the World Bank, the authors synthesised this quantitative picture with the international literature on long-term care models and regional care dynamics. Their conclusion is blunt: population ageing is outpacing the development of formal care systems across the region, and the costs of that gap are being paid invisibly, mostly by women.

The demographic mechanics behind the warning are well established but often misread. Fertility rates across MENA have fallen sharply over recent decades while life expectancy has climbed, producing the classic stages of a demographic transition. For years, the region enjoyed a favourable age structure, with large working-age cohorts supporting relatively few dependents, a dividend that fuelled growth in labour-abundant economies. That window is now closing. As cohorts born during earlier high-fertility eras move into older age, the share of adults over sixty-five is rising rapidly, and the total age dependency ratio, which measures the balance between people typically outside the labour force and those of working age, is shifting in ways that will strain pensions, health systems and household budgets alike.

What makes the MENA case distinctive is the speed and heterogeneity of the transition. The Gulf states face a compressed version of the challenge, where rapid modernisation, large migrant workforces and citizenship-based welfare systems create peculiar fiscal and social geometry. Middle-income countries such as Egypt and Jordan are ageing before they have become rich, leaving little fiscal room for new social programmes. Conflict-affected states face the starkest picture of all; research cited in the study documents how armed conflict in Syria has directly reduced life expectancy, while humanitarian assessments in Yemen describe older populations with minimal formal support. Any regional strategy, the authors argue, must account for this diversity rather than impose a single template.

At the heart of the analysis is the informal care economy, the vast, unrecorded system in which family members, overwhelmingly women, provide daily care for frail older relatives. Cultural norms across the Arab region place strong expectations on families, and particularly on daughters and daughters-in-law, to care for ageing parents at home. This system has historically absorbed demand at zero fiscal cost, but the study shows it is eroding under its own contradictions. Urbanisation is dispersing extended families, smaller family sizes mean fewer adult children per ageing parent, and rising female education and employment aspirations collide with the assumption that women will provide unpaid care indefinitely.

The consequences ripple through the entire economy. Women across MENA already have among the lowest labour force participation rates in the world, and the burden of informal caregiving is a documented barrier to paid work. The study highlights that women also spend more years in ill-health during old age than men, compounding the inequity across the life course. Every hour a woman spends providing unpaid care is an hour not spent in formal employment, not generating taxable income and not building her own pension entitlements. The authors frame this as a hidden economic cost that never appears in national accounts but systematically suppresses productivity, female economic inclusion and the long-term solvency of social insurance systems.

The quality-of-life dimension is equally serious. Without structured services, older people with dementia, disability or chronic multimorbidity depend entirely on relatives who may lack training, respite or support. The literature the authors synthesise points to elevated risks of elder abuse, caregiver burnout and depression among informal carers, and notes that conditions such as dementia are rising in prevalence across the region as populations age. Respite care, home-based health services and day centres remain scarce or absent in most MENA countries, with a few notable experiments such as Oman’s home health care programmes and Saudi Arabia’s expansion of home care under its Vision 2030 reform agenda cited as early signals of change.

The study’s most provocative argument is that this gap is not merely a liability but an opportunity. Formal long-term care is labour-intensive work that cannot be automated away, making it a potent source of employment, particularly for women. International Labour Organization analyses cited in the paper estimate that expanding care services globally generates employment multipliers well above those of comparable investments. The authors propose that MENA governments build regulated care infrastructure through workforce development, dedicated insurance financing models and public-private partnerships, creating decent jobs for care workers while simultaneously freeing other women to enter the labour market. In their framing, care investment functions like roads or power grids: infrastructure that unlocks broader economic activity.

Financing such systems in a region with tight budgets and large informal economies is the obvious objection, and the authors address it directly. They advocate incremental financing mechanisms that expand coverage gradually, learning from international experience including Japan’s long-term care insurance scheme and cash-for-care experiments in Europe, while adapting to regional realities such as the widespread reliance on migrant domestic workers in Gulf households. Formalising caregiving roles, extending social protection to care workers, and aligning long-term care investment with the Sustainable Development Goals are presented as mutually reinforcing priorities. The paper also points to recent pension reform in Saudi Arabia as evidence that structural social protection change is politically achievable in the region.

The study’s bottom line is a reframing. Ageing in MENA has been treated as a distant problem, perpetually deferred by the region’s youth bulge legacy. Hussein and her colleagues argue that the window for proactive policy is closing now, and that governments which integrate long-term care into national development planning, rather than quarantining it in health or welfare ministries, can convert a looming fiscal burden into a driver of equitable growth. The alternative, they warn, is a future in which ageing households are impoverished by care costs, women remain locked out of the labour market by unpaid caring obligations, and governments confront the same demographic pressures a decade later with fewer options and higher price tags. The choice, on their reading of the data, is between building the care economy deliberately or paying for its absence involuntarily.

Subject of Research: Demographic ageing and long-term care policy in the Middle East and North Africa

Article Title: Ageing and Long-Term Care in the Middle East: Towards Inclusive Development Strategies

Article References: Hussein, S., Ismail, M., & Pallares-Miralles, M. (2026). Ageing and Long-Term Care in the Middle East: Towards Inclusive Development Strategies. Ageing International, 51(4), Article 38. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12126-026-09678-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12126-026-09678-4

Keywords: population ageing, long-term care, MENA, informal caregiving, gender inequality, care economy, demographic transition, labour force participation, social protection, economic development, Gulf Cooperation Council, sustainable development goals

The Bono de Desarrollo Humano, or BDH, sits at the heart of Ecuador’s social protection system. Launched in 2003 as a successor to an earlier unconditional transfer, the programme provides monthly cash payments to low-income households, primarily mothers, on the condition that they attend preventive health visits and keep their children in school. Payments of fifty US dollars per month, rising to as much as one hundred and fifty dollars depending on the number of minors in the household, are distributed in cash through more than nine thousand authorised points across the country. At its peak, the programme reached over one million families and accounted for nearly 0.7 percent of Ecuador’s gross domestic product. In theory, the conditions attached to the money should push pregnant women toward at least five antenatal check-ups, while the income itself should ease the financial barriers that keep poor women from seeking care.

To test whether this theory holds in practice, researchers led by Sara Toros and Ana L. Moncayo assembled a panel dataset covering Ecuador’s 221 cantons, the second-level administrative divisions of the country, from January 2010 to December 2023. Because maternal deaths are rare events and vital registration quality varies across Ecuador, the team restricted their primary analysis to the 147 cantons with intermediate or high-quality birth and death registration, a classification previously validated using indicators such as registration completeness and the proportion of ill-defined deaths. Maternal deaths were identified according to World Health Organization criteria and the tenth revision of the International Classification of Diseases, capturing deaths during pregnancy or within forty-two days of its termination from pregnancy-related causes. The outcome measure was the maternal mortality ratio, expressed as maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, calculated annually for each canton.

The statistical approach was deliberately conservative. The researchers used negative binomial regression models for panel data, a choice driven by the over-dispersed distribution of maternal deaths across canton-years, and included fixed effects for both canton and year. Canton fixed effects absorb all time-invariant characteristics of each municipality, such as geography, culture and historical legacies, while year fixed effects account for national shocks affecting the whole country simultaneously. The exposure was measured in two ways: coverage of the eligible population, capturing how many qualifying families were actually enrolled, and coverage of the total canton population, which reflects the broader penetration of the programme within a community. Models were adjusted for poverty measured by the multidimensional Unsatisfied Basic Needs Index, adult illiteracy, physician density and hospital bed availability, and the team ran an extensive battery of sensitivity analyses to probe the robustness of their findings.

The descriptive picture is striking. Across the analysed cantons, the mean maternal mortality ratio almost halved over the study period, falling from 41.4 to 21.4 deaths per 100,000 live births. Yet the BDH moved in the opposite direction: coverage of the total population dropped from 42.3 percent to 24.1 percent, and coverage of the eligible population fell from 60.5 percent to 49.1 percent, largely because a 2013 update restricted eligibility to households in extreme poverty, cutting the number of recipients by about fifty-seven percent. Meanwhile, poverty, illiteracy and physician density all improved substantially, with physician density more than doubling from 9.6 to 22.5 per 10,000 inhabitants. Disentangling the effect of a shrinking programme from these concurrent social changes is precisely the challenge the fixed-effects design was built to address.

The headline result is a near-null association. In models adjusted for socioeconomic and health-system factors, each percentage-point increase in BDH coverage was associated with only a one percent reduction in the maternal mortality ratio, with confidence intervals that grazed the null value. Stratified analyses revealed little evidence of effect modification across poverty quintiles or dominant ethnic groups, though the strongest inverse associations appeared in cantons in the fourth poverty quintile and in Afro-Ecuadorian-majority cantons, where coverage of the total population was associated with a three percent lower mortality ratio. Urban cantons showed a modest protective association, while rural and mixed cantons showed none. In other words, where the programme seemed to matter most was where health services were actually available to absorb the additional demand for care.

Two contextual findings add nuance. After the 2013-14 eligibility update, a one-percentage-point increase in total-population coverage was associated with a three percent reduction in maternal mortality, a significantly stronger association than before the reform, and formal interaction tests supported this difference. Even more striking, during the COVID-19 pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, when Ecuadorian health services buckled and prenatal, delivery and postnatal care fell by forty-six, twenty-eight and thirty-eight percent respectively, higher BDH coverage was associated with two to three percent lower maternal mortality for both coverage measures. This suggests that cash transfers may act as a buffer during crises, cushioning households against the catastrophic income shocks and care disruptions that the pandemic imposed, even though the programme alone was insufficient to prevent an overall rise in maternal deaths during that period.

Why did Ecuador’s programme deliver so much less for maternal survival than its celebrated counterparts in Brazil and Mexico? The authors point to a crucial difference in implementation. Brazil’s Bolsa Família operates alongside the Family Health Strategy, a consolidated primary care system that actively monitors health conditionalities, including antenatal attendance, and has shown synergistic effects with the cash transfers. Mexico’s Prospera generated sustained demand that was matched by improvements in the supply of health services. In Ecuador, by contrast, compliance with the BDH’s conditionalities has never been systematically monitored, and sanctions for non-compliance have rarely been applied. The requirement of five antenatal check-ups, the very mechanism designed to detect hypertensive disorders, infections and other leading causes of maternal death, exists largely on paper. Without enforcement or linkage to a strong primary care network, the demand-side pathway from cash to care quietly breaks down.

The study has limitations that the authors acknowledge candidly. The ecological design measures exposure at the canton level and cannot capture individual or household-level mechanisms, although it is well suited to estimating population-level effects, including potential spillovers onto non-beneficiaries. Maternal deaths are recorded by place of occurrence rather than residence, which likely underestimates mortality in rural, high-coverage cantons and overestimates it in better-resourced referral centres, a non-differential misclassification that would bias estimates toward the null. Residual confounding from time-varying unmeasured factors, such as health reforms or concurrent social programmes, cannot be excluded, and ethnicity and urbanicity were treated as time-invariant proxies derived from the 2022 census. Yet sensitivity analyses, including province-level models, restriction to cantons with hospital beds and alternative census years, produced consistent results, lending credibility to the central conclusion.

The broader lesson extends well beyond Ecuador. Conditional cash transfers have become the default social protection instrument across Latin America and much of the developing world, and their documented successes in boosting school enrolment and service utilisation are real. But this study adds to a growing body of evidence that cash alone is unlikely to substantially reduce maternal deaths, a rare and multifactorial outcome shaped by the quality of obstetric care, emergency referral systems, skilled birth attendance and deep-rooted structural inequities that no monthly payment can dissolve. Among the 147 cantons analysed, forty-four had no hospital beds throughout the entire study period, and specialists remained concentrated in Quito, Guayaquil and Cuenca. The authors argue that the BDH should be seen not as a failed intervention but as a valuable platform, one that could be strengthened by enforcing health conditionalities, integrating culturally sensitive community-led services for Indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian women, and pairing income support with sustained investment in equitable, high-quality maternal healthcare. Cash, in other words, is a beginning, not a cure.

Subject of Research: The association between Ecuador's conditional cash transfer programme and maternal mortality

Article Title: Long-term association of a conditional cash transfer programme and maternal mortality in Ecuador: An ecological longitudinal study, 2010-2023

Article References: Long-term association of a conditional cash transfer programme and maternal mortality in Ecuador: An ecological longitudinal study, 2010-2023. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2026.101963

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2026.101963

Keywords: maternal mortality, conditional cash transfers, Ecuador, Bono de Desarrollo Humano, social protection, public health, health inequalities, antenatal care, fixed-effects regression, COVID-19, Latin America, health policy

The research team combined a survey of 384 Dalit respondents with 30 in-depth interviews and one focus group discussion, an unusually comprehensive evidence base for a population that is often invisible in national statistics. The quantitative results are stark in their descriptive power. More than six in ten respondents, 61.2 percent, reported experiencing caste-based discrimination directly. Nearly half, 47.7 percent, described housing insecurity, and 34.9 percent reported a complete absence of political representation. Subjective freedom of choice—the sense that one’s life path is genuinely open—averaged just 2.26 on a five-point scale, among the lowest readings of any construct in the survey.

Bivariate analyses reinforced the picture of systemic exclusion. Respondents strongly endorsed statements describing institutional neglect, with a mean agreement score of 3.99, and capability deprivation, at 3.86. When the researchers stratified respondents by income, analysis of variance revealed a statistically significant difference in health outcomes across income strata, F(2, 381) = 3.44, p = 0.033, though the effect size was small, with eta squared of 0.018. Health, in other words, deteriorated measurably as income fell, consistent with a body of South Asian literature linking caste exclusion to unequal access to medical care, sanitation work and safe housing.

Yet the study is notable as much for its methodological honesty as for its findings. The eleven Likert-scale items used to measure attitudes toward structural inequality and capability deprivation showed very low internal reliability, with a Cronbach’s alpha of just 0.01, and inter-item and inter-construct correlations were weak, averaging an absolute correlation of roughly 0.04. An exploratory multivariate model seeking predictors of a composite Poverty Dynamics index found no significant predictors at all, explaining a mere 2 percent of variance. The authors are explicit that their theoretical contributions are interpretive rather than statistically demonstrated, a candour that is rare in development research and that shifts the evidentiary weight decisively onto the qualitative material.

And it is the qualitative material that carries the study’s most striking argument. Across interviews, respondents described practices of untouchability that persist in labour markets, educational institutions and spatially segregated settlements. Dalit workers reported being confined to occupations considered polluting—sanitation work, sweeping, the handling of carcasses—regardless of their skills or aspirations. Parents described children humiliated in classrooms and steered away from education by teachers and peers alike. Settlements were described as physically separated from mainstream villages, a segregation that reproduces itself in who gets visited by extension workers, who receives relief, and who is invited to community decision-making.

From these accounts the authors derive their central conceptual contribution: a form of entrapment they call bonded poverty. The term deliberately echoes bonded labour, because respondents described something beyond individual income constraint—a systemic condition in which caste identity itself forecloses exit routes. A family may acquire a small asset, a child may complete primary school, a worker may change employer, yet the underlying conversion rates remain so unfavourable that gains evaporate. In capability terms, the problem is not merely that Dalit households lack resources; it is that the social rules governing how resources translate into valued functionings—being educated, being healthy, being respected, participating in public life—are rigged against them.

This is where the study’s engagement with the capability approach becomes theoretically significant. Sen’s framework holds that development should be judged by the substantive freedoms people enjoy, and that commodities alone do not determine wellbeing; conversion factors—personal, social and environmental—determine what a given resource can become in a person’s life. Husain and colleagues argue that caste operates precisely as a social conversion factor in Bangladesh: the same taka of income, the same year of schooling, the same plot of land yields less capability for a Dalit household than for a dominant-caste neighbour. The framing connects the Rangpur findings to a wider literature on caste-based diminished returns in India, where education has been shown to translate into less wealth for marginalised groups, and to systematic reviews documenting caste exclusion and health discrimination across South Asia.

The study also draws on intersectionality, noting that disadvantages do not simply add up but multiply. Dalit women appear in the qualitative accounts as bearing a compounded burden—excluded by caste in the street, by gender within the household economy, and by class in the labour market. The authors situate their analysis alongside scholarship on structural violence, the idea that harm is embedded in institutional arrangements rather than delivered only by identifiable perpetrators. Institutional neglect, in this reading, is not an absence of action but an active mechanism: when a settlement is left off a sanitation programme or a school roster, the omission itself produces injury.

The policy implications the authors draw are correspondingly structural. They call for strengthening social protection so that Dalit households receive reliable buffers against shocks, for enforcing anti-discrimination measures in labour markets and schools rather than leaving constitutional equality on paper, and for designing capability-enhancing interventions—education access, health services, political representation—that directly target the conversion factors their interviews exposed. They caution, implicitly, that income transfers alone will not dissolve bonded poverty if the social rules that devalue Dalit effort remain untouched. The finding that political representation is absent for a third of respondents suggests that even well-designed programmes may fail without Dalit voices inside the institutions that allocate them.

The research, conducted under ethical approval from Begum Rokeya University and in line with Bangladesh Medical Research Council guidelines, used pseudonyms and trauma-informed interviewing throughout, and the authors acknowledge the Dalit community of Rangpur Division for its openness. Its limitations are acknowledged with equal clarity: the survey instruments did not cohere statistically, the cross-sectional design cannot establish causation, and the multivariate model was null. But the study’s value lies in what it demonstrates about method as much as about caste. Where numbers failed to capture the mechanism, lived testimony succeeded—and the result is a rare, rigorous account of how an ancient hierarchy reproduces itself in a modern state, converting every generation’s modest gains back into the poverty it inherited.

Subject of Research: Caste-based marginalisation and intergenerational poverty among Dalit communities in Rangpur Division, Bangladesh, analysed through structural inequality and capability deprivation frameworks.

Article Title: Caste and poverty in Bangladesh: a mixed-methods analysis of dalit marginalisation through structural inequality and capability deprivation lenses

Article References: Husain, T., Hossain, D., & Kabir, H. (2026). Caste and poverty in Bangladesh: a mixed-methods analysis of dalit marginalisation through structural inequality and capability deprivation lenses. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 458. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01747-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01747-4

Keywords: Dalit, Bangladesh, caste discrimination, poverty, capability approach, structural inequality, mixed methods, social exclusion, Rangpur Division, bonded poverty, untouchability, social protection

The research, conducted by Susanta Sen, Asif Ali, Amit Banerjee, and Namita Chakma of the Department of Geography at The University of Burdwan in West Bengal, drew on two rounds of India’s National Family Health Survey: the fourth round, conducted in 2015–16 with 122,955 women, and the fifth round, conducted in 2019–21 with 118,700 women. The analysis focused on women aged 20 to 24 years, the standard age group used to assess child marriage prevalence under international indicators, since these women had passed beyond the age at which a legal marriage before 18 could have occurred. By comparing the two survey rounds, the researchers were able to track both the level of child marriage and the distribution of that practice across the wealth spectrum over roughly a five-year interval.

To measure inequality rigorously, the team employed the Erreygers Concentration Index, a widely used summary measure in health equity research that captures whether a health or social outcome is systematically concentrated among richer or poorer groups. A negative value of the index indicates that the outcome is concentrated among the economically disadvantaged. In both survey rounds, the Erreygers Concentration Index for child marriage was negative and statistically significant, confirming that the burden of marrying before 18 falls disproportionately on girls from poorer households. The index moved from −0.281, with a 95 percent confidence interval of −0.289 to −0.273, in the fourth round to −0.257, with a 95 percent confidence interval of −0.265 to −0.249, in the fifth round, indicating a modest narrowing of wealth-related inequality but no fundamental change in its direction or magnitude.

The absolute picture tells a similarly nuanced story. The absolute gap in child marriage prevalence between the poorest and richest groups narrowed from 20.65 percentage points in NFHS-4 to 19.04 percentage points in NFHS-5. Yet the relative measure moved in the opposite direction: the ratio of child marriage prevalence among the poor compared with the non-poor actually increased, from 2.07 to 2.20. This combination of a shrinking absolute gap and a widening relative gap is a classic pattern in epidemiology and social statistics, arising when prevalence declines faster in absolute terms among groups that already have lower baseline levels. In practical terms, even though fewer girls overall are marrying as children, a girl born into a poor household today remains substantially more exposed to the risk of early marriage than one born into affluence, and in relative terms that exposure has grown.

Beyond describing the inequality, the study’s central methodological contribution lies in its use of regression-based decomposition analysis, a technique that partitions the observed concentration index into contributions attributable to individual socio-demographic characteristics. Rather than simply noting that child marriage correlates with poverty, decomposition analysis quantifies how much of the measured inequality each factor statistically explains. The results were striking in their consistency: educational attainment dominated the explained component of wealth-related inequality in both survey rounds, accounting for 77.06 percent in NFHS-4 and 77.41 percent in NFHS-5. In other words, differences in schooling levels between rich and poor women are by far the largest statistical driver of why early marriage clusters among the disadvantaged.

The composition of the remaining explained inequality shifted over time in ways that offer clues about the changing social landscape. In the fourth survey round, place of residence, meaning the divide between urban and rural areas, was the second-largest contributor to wealth-related inequality in child marriage. By the fifth round, however, the contribution of mass media exposure had risen substantially, overtaking residential location as a key explanatory factor. This shift suggests that access to information, whether through television, radio, newspapers, or increasingly digital channels, has become a more salient axis of inequality as connectivity spreads unevenly across Indian society. It also implies that the messages, norms, and alternatives that media exposure conveys about marriage, gender roles, and women’s life courses play a measurable role in shaping when and whether girls marry.

The study also documented substantial variation across India’s states and Union Territories, underscoring that child marriage is not a uniform national phenomenon but one embedded in highly diverse regional contexts of culture, economy, and policy implementation. States differ enormously in baseline prevalence, in the steepness of the wealth gradient, and in the pace of change between the two survey rounds. This heterogeneity means that a single national policy lever, applied uniformly, is unlikely to produce equitable results. Regions where the wealth gradient is steepest may require intensively targeted approaches, while regions with lower but persistent prevalence may benefit more from broad norm-change campaigns and enforcement of existing legal prohibitions on marriage below the age of 18.

The public health significance of these findings extends well beyond the institution of marriage itself. Child marriage is internationally recognized as a driver of adverse outcomes including early pregnancy, elevated maternal and infant mortality risks, interrupted schooling, restricted economic agency, and increased vulnerability to domestic violence. When the burden of child marriage concentrates among the poorest girls, it functions as a mechanism through which poverty and disadvantage reproduce themselves across generations. The study’s conclusion that reductions in overall prevalence have not been matched by equivalent reductions in socioeconomic inequality echoes a broader theme in development research: aggregate progress can mask persistent, and sometimes widening, disparities that demand explicit equity-oriented policy attention.

The authors point toward a set of policy directions grounded in their decomposition results. Because education explains such an overwhelming share of the inequality, interventions that support girls’ secondary education, reduce the economic pressures that push families to withdraw daughters from school, and keep adolescents enrolled through the years when marriage decisions are typically made stand out as the highest-leverage options. The growing contribution of mass media exposure suggests that improving access to information, and using media channels deliberately to shift social norms around early marriage, could complement educational investments. The researchers also highlight strengthening social protection for economically disadvantaged households and explicitly prioritizing the poorest families in programmatic targeting, since the data confirm that the risk of child marriage remains most intense at the bottom of the wealth distribution.

Ultimately, the study delivers a message that is both encouraging and cautionary. India has made genuine progress: child marriage prevalence declined measurably between 2015–16 and 2019–21, and the concentration index softened slightly. But the persistence of a large absolute wealth gap, the rise in the poor-to-non-poor prevalence ratio, and the stark regional differences all indicate that the finish line remains distant for the girls whom the practice continues to touch most directly. As India and the global community pursue the elimination of child marriage under international development goals, this research argues that success should be judged not only by how far national averages fall, but by how quickly the gap closes for those at the bottom, where the consequences of marrying too young are felt most severely.

Subject of Research: Wealth-related socioeconomic inequality in child marriage among young women in India

Article Title: Wealth-related inequality in child marriage in India using decomposition analysis

Article References: Sen, S., Ali, A., Banerjee, A., & Chakma, N. (2026). Wealth-related inequality in child marriage in India using decomposition analysis. Discover Social Science and Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00488-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00488-2

Keywords: child marriage, India, wealth inequality, Erreygers Concentration Index, decomposition analysis, National Family Health Survey, girls' education, mass media exposure, social protection, public health, NFHS-5, socioeconomic disparity