Acknowledgments
This report is the product of the collaborative effort of a core team led by Joana Silva and comprising Victoria Levin and Matteo Morgandi (principal authors), Mohamad Alloush (data management and analysis), Facundo Cuevas, Tarsicio Castañeda, and Carole Abi Nahed Chartouni. In addition, Victoria Levin and Facundo Cuevas supported at different stages the coordination of the project; Facundo Cuevas also helped to raise funds for the realization of the MENA SPEAKS survey and the Jordan Gives experiment. Bénédicte de la Brière, Ruslan Yemtsov, Karla Hoff, and Hana Brixi provided guidance and useful inputs at different stages of this report. Amy Gautam and Mary Anderson edited the report. Background papers were written for this report by Tarsicio Castañeda, Facundo Cuevas, Abhishek Gupta, Mohamad Alloush, Carole Abi Nahed Chartouni, Yohana Dukhan, Paul B. Siegel, and Quentin Wodon. Anne Hilger, Rania Atieh, Yohana Dukhan, Haneen Sayed, Samira Hillis, Sherine Al-Shawarby, Dorothee Chen, Ezequiel Molina, Lillian Frost, Maaouia Ben Nasr, Sebastian Trenner, Hala Ballout, Kristen Himelein, and Yasmeen Tabbaa provided very useful inputs. The report benefited greatly from the feedback received during extended consultations. In particular, we are grateful to representatives of government, academia, civil society, NGOs, and CSOs from Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and West Bank and Gaza as well as to the International Labour Organization and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, who participated in the regional workshops (in Beirut, January 13–14, 2012; Tunis, January 16–17, 2012; and Muscat, April 16–17, 2012) and in national consultations in Jordan (January 10, 2012). We thank the team that developed the World Bank Social Protection Strategy for MENA, and in particular Rebekka Grun (task leader), Surat Nsour, Victoria Levin, Sebastian xxi