12 June 2019 Tom Lavers   Two recent ESID papers published in African Affairs and Social Science and Medicine (both open access) analyse the political drivers of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), one of the largest social assistance programmes in Af

19 March 2019   Social protection expert Dr Tom Lavers gives a presentation to The African Studies Centre at The University of Oxford.    

 5 March 2019       ESID researcher Dr Tom Lavers is currently in Ethiopia disseminating our work on social protection. This presentation was delivered in Addis Ababa to donors, on the variation in the targeting of the Productive Safety Net Programme – the PSNP    

    14 May 2018 Tom Lavers   A drive of little more than an hour from the eastern edge of Tigray into Afar serves to illustrate some of the many extremes of Ethiopia: a drop in altitude of more than 1,000m; an increase in temperature from the moderate (albeit far from M

Working paper 73 Download pdf Tom Lavers Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) is among the largest social protection programmes in Africa and has been promoted as a model for the continent. This paper analyses the political drivers of the programme, arguing that elite com

Working paper 71 Download pdf Tom Lavers Ethiopia has been piloting and scaling up a community-based health insurance scheme for the informal sector since 2011, alongside preparations for the launch of a social health insurance scheme for the formal sector. This paper examines the pol

30 March 2015 By Tom Lavers When and why do states take a direct interest in the welfare of their populations? What types of state introduce social policies and which ones are capable of delivering on these commitments? Research on the politics of social policy in Europe, the US, Lati

Role Tom is a Lecturer in Politics and Development at the Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester, and lead researcher for the ESID project, ‘The political economy of social protection expansion in Africa’. Research Tom’s research interests concern the changing natu

Objectives This research analyses the political economy of social protection policy formulation and implementation in sub-Saharan Africa, with a view to explaining variation in national experiences. Cases Five countries have been selected for in-depth analysis, comprising three countr

7 April 2014. Last month our partners at the Ghana Center for Democratic Development hosted political scientist Richard Joseph (Northwestern University) for a talk in which he questioned the “revisionist” argument that high levels of economic growth require sacrificing som