We investigate the effects of a positive income shock on mental health among adolescent girls using evidence from a cash transfer experiment in Malawi. Offers of cash transfers strongly reduced psychological distress among baseline schoolgirls. However, these large beneficial effects declined with increases in the transfer amount offered to the parents conditional on regular school attendance b...

P roviding assistance to the poor through in-kind transfers, such as vouchers for food and housing, garners more political support than providing assistance in cash. Supporters of such policies believe that providing voucher payments for certain goods (such as groceries) will cause recipients to purchase more of the goods being subsidized, and that recipients will not be able to use public assi...

BACKGROUND Cash transfer interventions are forms of social protection based on the provision of cash to vulnerable households with the aim of reduce risk, vulnerability, chronic poverty and improve human capital. Such interventions are already an integral part of the response to HIV/AIDS in some settings and have recently been identified as a core element of World Health Organization's End TB S...

Progressively targeted cash transfers remain the dominant policy response to chronic poverty in developing countries. But are there alternative social protection policies that might have larger poverty impacts over time for the same public expenditure? To explore this question, this paper develops a dynamic stochastic model of of consumption and asset accumulation by households that confront a ...

BACKGROUND Acute malnutrition is a public health issue worldwide, and particularly in the Eastern region of Burkina Faso. Following a needs assessment, unconditional seasonal, multiannual cash transfers were implemented as a safety net to prevent childhood undernutrition. The objectives of this study were to explore the types of purchases made by beneficiaries of this cash transfer program and ...

Abstract Institutionalized conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs may affect pre-existing, informal safety nets such as inter-household transfers and trust among community members. This study reports on a randomized controlled trial used to test the impact of CCTs various measures within communities in Tanzania. It provides evidence that introduction CCT program increased beneficiaries’ other...

Investing in social protection in sub-Saharan Africa has taken on a new urgency as HIV and AIDS interact with other drivers of poverty to simultaneously destabilise livelihoods systems and family and community safety nets. Cash transfer programmes already reach millions of people in South Africa, and in other countries in southern and East Africa plans are underway to reach tens and eventually ...

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have been widely used in the developing world as a tool to break the poverty cycle. Short-term studies have found positive impacts of CCTs on education and health outcomes. However, little is known about longer-term outcomes of beneficiaries and any unintended consequences, namely on fertility, that there may be. This paper assesses medium-term (5-6 year...

Previous studies find large cross-national differences in inequality amongst rich Western nations, due in large part to differences in the generosity of welfare state transfers. The United States is the least generous nation and the one having the most after-tax and transfer inequality. But these analyses are limited to the effects of cash and near-cash transfers and direct taxes on incomes, wh...

Background Nigeria accounts for a significant proportion of global maternal mortality figures with little progress made in curbing poor health indices. In a bid to reverse this trend, the Government of Nigeria initiated a conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme to encourage pregnant women utilize services at designated health facilities. This study aims to understand experiences of women who ...