When cash alone is not enough: the transformative power of cash plus programmes

(14 May 2018) Research has shown that cash transfers promote economic empowerment. The direct payment of cash to the poorest households contributes toward improved social outcomes and sustainable livelihoods, while making local economies more dynamic. However, despite the benefits, cash alone is not a silver bullet. For example, evidence suggests that cash alone is not always sufficient to secure the safe transition of adolescents to adulthood. Results from several countries suggest that external conditions, such as the labour market or access to quality services, impact the success of cash transfers. Where adolescents are concerned cash alone has not always been successful in reducing significant risks such as violence, early marriage and sexually transmitted diseases. How then can we use cash transfers to more effectively protect and prepare adolescents for healthy productive adulthoods?

A group of Cash Plus livelihood and health training course participants discuss an assignment in Ikama Village in the Rungwe District of Tanzania.

The Transfer Project

‘Cash plus’ may provide the answer. Leading social protection partner of UNICEF Innocenti, The Transfer Project, has gathered extensive evidence on the effects of social protection programmes on adolescent well-being. They are now engaged in examining the potential for additional key interventions and linkages to services – a ‘cash plus’ component – targeting youth. These initiatives examine whether a package of adolescent-focused interventions can improve future economic opportunities for adolescents and facilitate healthy transition to adulthood. Interventions include life skills training, sexual and reproductive health education, HIV treatment, peer support groups, and mentoring.

Cash Plus in Action: Tanzania Results

The Transfer Project’s most recent studies from Tanzania help illustrate the scale of the programme and the potential for cash plus to improve adolescent well-being and empowerment. Yet for adolescent boys and girls, transitioning to adulthood means facing significant social, health and economic risks. To mitigate these risks the Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF), along with UNICEF and other key stakeholders, are implementing an intervention where social protection and economic empowerment interventions are combined with adolescent training in business and livelihood skills, sexual and reproductive health education and support services as a core part of Government cash transfer schemes.

“We met close to a hundred adolescent trainees, peer educators and mentors actively involved in the cash plus training in three villages in Rungwe district of southern Tanzania,” said Dale Rutstein, Communication Chief of UNICEF Innocenti, recently returned from a cash plus filmmaking mission. “In the mornings, young people delivered impressively detailed long-term business plans – for dairy production, dress-making and farming – and in the afternoon they practiced how to use male and female condoms.

“We met one 19-year-old peer educator who had given birth to a child at age 17 who said if she had had the training at a younger age her life would have been dramatically changed.”

Recent cash plus research studies

A recently completed18-month mixed methods study, Tanzania Youth Study of the Productive Social Safety Net, provides evidence on the effects of Tanzania’s cash transfer programme: ‘Productive Social Safety Net,’ or PSSN, on youth well-being and transition to adulthood. Results of this study reveal certain positive effects that cash transfers have on youth education outcomes, participation in economic activities, and material well-being. Importantly, results also highlighted the limitations of cash to positively impact mental and physical well-being, sexual behaviour, or experiences of violence. The findings confirm that cash alone is not always sufficient to reduce the broad, interrelated social and economic risks that vulnerable populations face.

Another new study, A Cash Plus Model for Safe Transitions to a healthy and Productive Adulthood, carried out in 2017, and recently presented to the Tanzanian government, establishes baseline findings required for conducting a 24 month impact evaluation of Tanzania’s current ‘cash plus’ programme, exploring how cash combined with training and linkages to other support services enable youth to benefit more efficiently from household participation in cash transfer programmes. The findings reveal insights into young people’s lives and behaviour, particularly around accessing health services, economic activities, and education.

What Next?

Adolescence is an intense period of physical transformation and brain development, representing a unique window of opportunity. Investments in adolescence are often referred to as having a “triple dividend” with benefits today, in adolescents’ future adult life, and in the next generation of children.

An adolescent girl from Makandana Village in the Rungwe District of Tanzania presents her future business plans during the closing ceremony of the Cash Plus livelihood and health training course.

The second phase of this study looks to amplify the impact of cash to fully benefit from this window of opportunity. At the end of the two-year cash plus randomized cluster trials, it is envisioned that Tanzania will have robust evidence on the impact of the “plus” component targeted to adolescents, layered on top of the existing social protection scheme. The findings should indicate which aspects of the cash plus programme work well and which need refinement, as well as considerations for scaling up the programme, to give more young people in Tanzania the chance to reach their full productive potential as healthy adults.

With a projected 35 million Tanzanians aged between 15 and 34 in the year 2035, investments made today present immense potential for Tanzania’s prosperity. Given its implementation within an existing large scale government social protection programme, cash plus may be a scalable solution to intergenerational poverty, empowering adolescents - both now and in the future - to reach their full potential.

You can read the Cash Plus Project Brief here.

Access FAO's book, From Evidence to Action: The story of cash transfers and impact evaluation in sub-Saharan Africa, here.

Handbook on adolescent development research published

(13 April 2018) Despite huge gains in child well-being during the MDG era, progress for adolescents – children in the second decade of life – is still lagging behind. The recently published Handbook of Adolescent Development Research and its Impact on Global Policy, edited by Jennifer E. Lansford and Prerna Banati, aims to fill critical evidence gaps to speed evolution of better policy-making specifically tuned to this dynamic life stage.

Of the 1.2 billion adolescents in the world today, 90% live in low- and middle-income countries. Enrollment in secondary schools is still low for adolescents in many parts of the world, with illiteracy rates approaching 30% in the least developed countries. Further, adolescents not in school are more vulnerable to trafficking, recruitment into armed conflict, and child labor. Many adolescent girls marry and begin bearing children at a young age, contributing to the perpetuation of poverty and health problems.

A group of youth use a smartphone to take a selfie outside a Community Management Committee meeting in Assamo neighbourhood in Djibouti.

Adolescents also represent a resource to be cultivated through education and training, to move them toward economic independence. This can be accomplished through initiatives to improve their reproductive health, and through positive interpersonal relationships to help them avoid risky behaviors and make positive decisions about their futures.

“Several years ago, a similar handbook on early childhood development was transformative in our approach to early childhood. By bringing state of the art research to policymakers and practitioners, we hope this volume will go some way to improving the lives of adolescents globally,” said Prerna Banati, lead researcher on adolescent well-being at UNICEF Innocenti.

The new handbook will be invaluable for a wide range of stakeholders working with adolescents in low- and middle-income countries. The volume tackles both the challenges and the promise of adolescence by presenting recent research on social, emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and physical development. The volume looks at adolescent development with a distinctive focus on issues that affect adolescents in low- and middle-income countries. It adopts a positive framing, representing young people as opportunities, to accelerate a positive shift in discourses around young people.

According to Laurence Steinberg of Temple University, a leading expert on adolescence, the handbook is “An important and timely resource. It combines up-to-date reviews of research on adolescent development by the world's leading authorities with thoughtful discussions of some of the most pressing concerns that societies face in both developed and developing countries in their efforts to minimize problematic outcomes and maximize positive development during this critical stage of development.”

In most contexts, policy and programme responses to adolescents are fragmented and inconsistent. Disconnects between national level policies and local services, as well as lack of continuity with early childhood responses, present a significant challenge to ensuring a coherent approach for this age group. Increasingly, adolescent participation and demands for rights-based approaches are seen, and often unfortunately conflated with violence. This volume adopts the perspective of young people as a valued investment both at individual and societal levels.

“An important and timely resource. It combines up-to-date reviews of research on adolescent development by the world's leading authorities with thoughtful discussions of some of the most pressing concerns that societies face in both developed and developing countries..."

- Laurence Steinberg, Temple University

“The bulk of research comes from high income contexts, so we don’t have a good enough evidence base in the settings where most adolescents are living today,” said Banati. “There has been quite a bit of policy attention paid to older adolescents, younger adolescence seems to slip between the policy cracks. There is also substantial incoherence in policy approaches, as evidenced in the volume.”

Over the last thirty-five years, specialized journals addressing adolescent issues have been launched, including the Journal of Adolescence, the Journal of Adolescent Research, and the Journal of Research on Adolescents. Despite a growth in scholarly literature, much is still disproportionately focused on adolescent experience in high income Western contexts, with comparatively few empirical studies of young people growing up in non-Western nations published in English language journals devoted to the field of adolescent development. Much scientific evidence developed in the global North, lacks reflection on the diverse experiences of adolescents around the world, including in harsh situations of war, conflict, chronic stress or malnutrition. And surprisingly few of the major scientific findings on adolescence have been translated into effective policy.

Adolescence is often described as the developmental period from the onset of puberty until the transition to adulthood, variously defined by one, some or all of the following: marriage, parenthood, completion of formal education, financial independence from parents (approximately ages 10-20). 

According to the handbook: “Arguably a social construction, its initial widespread use conferred gender, race and class connotations and implications: ‘the ‘adolescent boy’ was to be managed and contained, while allowed to be ‘wild;’ the adolescent girl was to be trained and domesticated’ (Morrow, 2015). In modern times, adolescence has largely had a bad reputation. Used interchangeably with ‘teenager,’ Western notions tend to describe a period of ‘storm and stress’ (Hall, 1904), involving hormones, drama, unsafe experimentation, and irresponsibility. However, in many parts of the world, arriving at adolescence marks increasing responsibility – with many hurtling towards adulthood by entering the workforce, marriage or parenthood. Adolescents in one country may be protected from economic or domestic responsibilities, in another, such responsibilities may not only be the norm, but considered beneficial for both the adolescent and the family.”

A diverse group of over 50 authors from different countries and disciplinary backgrounds have contributed chapters to this volume. This diversity reflects the complexity of adolescence, while allowing the volume to situate adolescents within broader cultural contexts. This makes the volume more relevant for global policy debates and political decision-making regarding when, why, and how some programs and interventions for adolescents should be tailored to better serve the needs of their intended recipients. The diverse contributions collectively relay a powerful underlying narrative seen across the chapters, which describes adolescents as a positive force, to be valued and understood. In challenging historical interpretations of adolescence, the volume has engaged with contemporary issues explicitly, and sometimes implicitly across the chapters, including the topics of migration and human security, technology and inequality.