Summary. — The empowerment of women, broadly defined, is an often-cited objective and benefit of social cash transfer programs in developing countries. Despite the promise and potential of cash transfers to empower women, the evidence supporting this outcome is mixed. In addition, there is little evidence from programs at scale in sub-Saharan Africa. We conducted a mixed-methods evaluation of the Government of Zambia’s Child Grant Program, a poverty-targeted, unconditional transfer given to mothers or primary caregivers of young children aged zero to five. The quantitative component was a four-year longitudinal clustered-randomized control trial in three rural districts, and the qualitative component was a one-time data collection involving in-depth interviews with women and their partners stratified on marital status and program participation. Our study found that women in beneficiary households were making more sole or joint decisions (across five out of nine domains); however, impacts translated into relatively modest increases in the number of decision domains a woman is involved in, on average by 0.34 (or a 6% increase over a baseline mean of 5.3). Qualitatively, we found that changes in intrahousehold relationships were limited by entrenched gender norms, which indicate men as heads of household and primary decision makers. However, women’s narratives showed the transfer increased financial empowerment as they were able to retain control over transfers for household investment and savings for emergencies. We highlight methodological challenges in using intrahousehold decision making as the primary indicator to measure empowerment. Results show potential for unconditional cash transfer programs to improve the financial and intrahousehold status of female beneficiaries, however it is likely additional design components are need for transformational change.

In Africa, state-sponsored cash transfer programs now reach nearly 50 million people. Do these programs raise long-term living standards? We examine this question using experimental data from two unconditional cash transfer programs implemented by the Zambian Government. We find far-reaching effects of the programs both on food security and consumption as well as on a range of productive outcomes. After three years, household spending is on average 67 percent larger than the value of the transfer received, implying a sizeable multiplier effect, which works through increased non-farm activity and agricultural production.

This paper explores the extent to which government-run cash transfer programs in four sub-Saharan countries affect food security and nutritional outcomes. These programs include Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty, Kenya’s Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children, Lesotho’s Child Grants Program and Zambia’s Child Grant model of the Social Cash Transfer program. Our cross-country analysis highlights the importance of robust program design and implementation to achieve the intended results. We find that a relatively generous and regular and predictable transfer increases the quantity and quality of food and reduces the prevalence of food insecurity. On the other hand, a smaller, lumpy and irregular transfer does not lead to impacts on food expenditures. We complement binary treatment analysis with continuous treatment analysis to understand not only the impact of being in the program but also the variability in impacts by the extent of treatment.

Among policymakers, a common perception surrounding the effects of cash transfer programmes, particularly unconditional programmes targeted to families with children, is that they induce increased fertility. We evaluate the Zambian Child Grant Programme, a government unconditional cash transfer targeted to families with a child J Popul Econ under the age of 5 and examine impacts on fertility and household composition. The evaluation was a cluster randomized control trial, with data collected over 4 years from 2010 to 2014. Our results indicate that there are no programme impacts on overall fertility. Our results contribute to a small evidence base demonstrating that there are no unintended incentives related to fertility due to cash transfers.

We study the impact of the Zimbabwe Harmonized Social Cash Transfer (HSCT) on household food security after 12 months of implementation. We investigate determinants of food security as measured by a well-known food security scale – the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) – and as measured by value of household food consumption composed of own-production, market purchases and gifts received. We find that several dimensions of household vulnerability correlate more strongly with the food security measure than with food consumption. Labor constraints, which is a key vulnerability criterion used by the HSCT to target households, is an important predictor of the food security score but not food consumption, and its effect on food security is even larger during the lean season. Impact analysis shows that the program has had statistically significant impacts on Food Security and Diet Diversity scores but null to low impacts on food consumption. However aggregate food consumption hides dynamic activity taking place within the household where the cash is used to obtain more food from the market and rely less on food received as gifts. The cash in turn gives beneficiaries greater choice in their food basket, which improves diet diversity.