Summary Responding to poverty and vulnerability is a dynamic and constantly evolving area of work. Development agencies often possess extraordinary presence, knowledge and expertise of addressing poverty and vulnerability at the field level. The challenge is to ensure this good practice and innovation is captured and used to inform policy and programmes in an effective way. With funding from Irish Aid, the Centre for Social Protection at IDS formed a partnership with UNICEF to research how social protection programming can interrupt the intergenerational transfer of poverty (IGT) through investments in human capital (education, health, nutrition). The two main objectives of the research were: To enhance lesson learning within a multi‐sited organisation (UNICEF) around good practice in social protection programming and the potential for addressing poverty and vulnerability. To increase understanding of ways in which research and communication can be used to capture and improve good practice within a multilateral organisation. Research was conducted on three case studies: the Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (CT‐OVC) in Kenya, the Social Cash Transfer (SCT) in Zambia, and the Child Money Programme (CMP) in Mongolia. Research aimed to understand which factors in social protection programming (e.g. design, implementation) account for success. The three country case studies were chosen because they are social protection programmes that are at different stages. The Zambia SCT is at the stage of scaling up design from a pilot to a national scale social protection programme. The Kenya OVC‐SCT is at the stage of expanding a national social protection programme. The Mongolia CMP was a national social protection programme that had been terminated, providing insights into why programmes fail to establish themselves in the long term.

Purpose: The main objective of this paper was to assess environmental accessibility for people with vision, hearing and speech disabilities in Mongolia, with particular focus on public buildings and public transportation.Methods: A standardised internationally-used questionnaire, consisting of 29 questions, was used for the accessibility of public buildings assessment.  The questionnaire results were grouped into categories and descriptive statistics were obtained. To determine quality and accessibility to public transportation a standardised sheet, consisting of 51 questions from the internationally accepted SERVQUAL, was used. This model is commonly used for measurement of the discrepancies between actual performance and customer expectations.Result: Assessment of public buildings in Mongolia revealed that they were moderately accessible for people with vision, hearing and speech disabilities. The assessment of public transportation found that the discrepancy between actual performance and customer expectation is the highest across all indicators for people with hearing and speech impairments.Conclusion: The research findings indicated a strong need to pay closer attention to the current environmental unfriendliness and inaccessibility faced by people with vision, hearing and speech disabilities.

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With 2.59 children per woman in 2008, Mongolia appears today as an exception in East Asia where fertility rates are far below the replacement level. Moreover, from its historical nadir of 1.95 children per women in 2005, fertility is on the rise. This paper first presents recent fertility development in Mongolia. Second, based on the experiences of European and East Asian countries, factors contributing to the development of low fertility are discussed in reference to the Mongolian context. Most of these factors are indeed found in Mongolia and could probably contribute to reducing fertility in the future. However, the country also presents cultural-family practices and recently-adopted fertility-family incentives which may support and stabilize fertility rates. These recent fertility-incentives factors and policies adopted by the Government of Mongolia are discussed in the final part from the perspective of equity, efficiency, and efficacy proposed by McDonald (2006b, ''An assessment of policies that support having children from the perspectives of equity, efficiency and efficacy'', Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2006, Special issue on 'Postponement of childbearing on Europe', 213-234). The aim is to determine if these measures are efficient to counterbalance and cancel out the depressing fertility effects.