fragile setting in which a TUP program has ever been evaluated, with battle-related fatalities estimated at 172 per 100,000 people during the study period.<sup>6</sup> Second, we present evidence of the protective effects of the TUP program amidst multiple concurrent exogenous shocks, and explore the potential mechanisms through which the program strengthens resilience under such system-wide crises. Shorter-term impacts in fragile and conflict-affected settings have been observed in Afghanistan, Niger, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Bedoya et al., 2019; Bossuroy et al., 2022; Chowdhury et al., 2017; Angelucci et al., 2023). While countries face structural fragility and security conditions (with some facing worsening conflict and associated economic effects), the combined health, economic and climate shocks experienced during this study provide an important opportunity to understand coping mechanisms and resilience to multi-dimensional shocks which are expected to be an increasing feature of poverty reduction strategies in the future. While protective effects of similar multifaceted interventions against external shocks in non-fragile settings have been documented (see Macours et al. (2022) for a “cash plus” intervention), we are not aware of studies on TUP’s effectiveness in building resilience in the context of fragility and multiple concurrent exogenous shocks to date.

Third, we present evidence that TUP programs have the potential to reduce village-level inequality, enduring through significantly harsh conditions. This builds on the existing evidence from Bangladesh where, despite significant inequality at baseline between ultra-poor and non-ultra-poor households, the program allowed treatment households to accumulate assets and take on occupations similar to non-UP households, reducing gaps with the next socioeconomic category to the ultra-poor, the near-poor, four years after the asset transfer (Bandiera et al., 2017).

The paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 describes the nature of the shocks experienced by Afghans during the period between study’s midline and endline surveys and the trends in critical outcomes for nontreated households during this period. Section 3 describes the TUP program and Section 4 explains the study design. We present the main results in Section 5, present a discussion on mechanisms in Section 6, provide a benchmarking of these results against non-UP socioeconomic conditions in Section 7, and discuss costs and benefits of the program in Section 8. Section 9 concludes.

Yemen during an onset of social unrest but changes in the implementation post-randomization affected the study’s ability to reliably measure with precision impacts across multiple dimensions. Therefore, the authors are unable to determine whether the lack of impacts on some dimensions are due to the crisis or to the compromise in the design for the implementer re-qualification process after the randomization (Brune et al., 2022).

> 6Own estimates using the yearly battle-related civilian and military deaths for the years in which the TUP was implemented in each country Pettersson et al. (2021), divided by the country’s population from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators. Afghanistan’s battle-related deaths estimate is 17 times as large as Pakistan’s (10 battle-related deaths per 100,000 people); 7 times as large as the Republic of Yemen’s (24 per 100,000 people); and 6 times as large as South Sudan’s (29 per 100,000 people), for the years when the TUP studies took place in each country. The periods include intervention and impact analyses as follows: 2016-2018 for Afghanistan, 2009-2013 for Pakistan, 2010-2014 for Yemen, and 2013-2015 for South Sudan. The average battle-related casualties per year were also much higher in Afghanistan (58 per 100,000 people), followed by South Sudan (9.8), Yemen (4.8), and Pakistan (2.4).

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