Cash transfers, child development and women´s empowerment

Cash transfers (CTs) are important tools in fighting extreme poverty and promoting child development.

Many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) rely on CTs in their national social protection systems, reaching more than 700 million people. CTs are often targeting mothers in order to promote child development and gender equality.

However, there are significant knowledge gaps on the link between CTs and child development as well as gender equality: we lack evidence on the cost-effectiveness of CTs relative to parenting programs and on the importance of choosing the mother or the father as the recipient.

In this project, we will leverage the new state-of-the-art research infrastructure of an ongoing nationally representative longitudinal study in Tanzania. The ongoing study includes an RCT with a parenting program.

This project will implement an unconditional cash transfer (UCT) to 800 households in which we randomize whether mothers or fathers receive the transfer.

This will i) allow us to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of a UCT program and compare it to that of a parenting program that is comparable in timing, setting, and the age of the target child and ii) evaluate whether children are better off with mothers or fathers as recipients.

Furthermore, we will investigate the effects of gender-targeted CTs on different domains of women’s empowerment, such as decision-making and bargaining power within the household, and on intimate partner violence.