Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme — Public Works Payments for Watershed & Rangeland Rehabilitation

Since 2005, the Government of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), coordinated by the Ministry of Agriculture's Food Security Coordination Directorate with pooled financing from the World Bank (IDA), USAID, the UK's FCDO, the EU, Irish Aid, Sida and Canada, has combined social protection with environmental public works. Under its Public Works pillar, food-insecure rural households receive cash or food payments for around six months of labour a year building soil and water conservation structures, terracing, small-scale irrigation and — critically — enclosing hillsides as “area closures” that let degraded rangeland and forest regenerate naturally. Roughly one million labour-constrained people also receive unconditional transfers for 12 months a year.

Under the most recently completed phase (PSNP 5), communities treated 1.2 million hectares of land across 11,800 watersheds and completed or rehabilitated nearly 2,600 community infrastructure assets, according to the World Bank's March 2026 announcement of the programme's sixth phase. EU project-tracking data (capacity4dev) records €61.58 million in EU financing for PSNP's fourth phase alone, pooled alongside the other donors. Cumulatively the wider PSNP has reached over 23 million people with shock-responsive support, and 1.45 million households gained bank accounts through the programme. Independent academic research published in the journal Global Environmental Change found that public-works watershed treatments measurably increased tree and woody cover in treated micro-watersheds relative to untreated comparison areas.

Multiple independent evaluations (including by IDS and 3ie, and analysis published in the World Bank Economic Review) also document persistent operational weaknesses: payment delays are one of PSNP's most recurring failures, prompting researchers to describe “a safety net delayed is a safety net denied,” and political-economy studies have found targeting errors and non-need-based exclusions in some areas. The ecological outputs are real and independently measured, but the underlying payment mechanism has not always been timely or well-targeted.

Read the full analysis: https://capacity4dev.europa.eu/projects/project_psnp_ethiopia_en