Maternal, reproductive, and newborn health (MRNH) is a key determinant of the opportunities that women and their children will have in life. MRNH includes a woman's right to safely bear children and to freely decide whether to have them, how many to have, and when. Gender equity in health refers to the absence of avoidable differences between men and women in access to health care and in the probability of suffering illness, incapacity, or premature death.

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have seen an increase in the number of poor households in temporary urban settlements characterized by informal land tenure. That increase provides the context for a serious problem for theregion's women, whether in couples or as single heads of household: gender inequality in home ownership caused by women's disproportionately low access to land title.

I review the evidence on access to water and sanitation infrastructure and child outcomes In Latin America. I show that there are large differences in access across countries and, within countries, between households living in urban and rural areas. Many papers in the public health literature show associationsbetween access to clean water sources or improved sanitation, on the one hand, and child outcomes like the incidence of diarrhea or child development, on the other. These papers provide only weak evidence of causality.

This paper presents the results of a randomized controlled trial on the long-term impacts of a youth training program. The empirical analysis estimates labor market impacts six years after the training - including long-term labor market trajectories of young people - and, it is one of the first experimental long-term evaluation of a youth training program outside the US. We are able to track a representative sample of more than 3,200 youths at the six-year follow-up.

This monograph reviews the processes used by conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to recertify beneficiaries for services or classify them as ready to leave the programs. Most countries have attempted recertification to identify beneficiaries who are no longer poor and/or to increase the efficiency of the program when a new targeting mechanism is developed. Until recently however, in part because of high political costs, recertification has been slow and only sometimes followed by program exit.

This Breve is based on a webinar presented by Jonathan Dartnell and Aine Heaney, at NPS MedicineWise, on August 18 of 2015, to the members of CRITERIA, the IDB Knowledge Network on Health Benefits Packages and Priority Setting in Health.