A new study reviews the impacts of child labour policies

(7 March 2017) Research that is open, available and transparent for academics, implementers, donors and the public includes ensuring that data is free and accessible. This push for ‘open science’ and promoting openness in research is expected to encourage increased knowledge generation, collaboration, diffusion of results and replication, among others. With this vision in mind, the longitudinal evaluation data from the Government of Kenya’s Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (CT-OVC) has just been released. This is the first data to be released through the Transfer Project, a joint partnership between national governments and UNICEF Country Offices, FAO, Save the Children UK and the University of North Carolina, including a core set of researchers from the UNICEF Office of Research--Innocenti.The Government of Kenya supported the release of the three-wave household panel of data collected in 2007, 2009 and 2011 as part of a cluster randomized controlled trial, to evaluate the impact of Kenya’s CT-OVC programme. The data package contains primary datasets from individual/household surveys and community surveys. There are also several supplementary datasets that provide additional information on tracking and attrition. Although topics addressed vary slightly across the surveys, all three waves contain information on topics including consumption and expenditure, health, education, and productivity of recipient (treatment group) and non-recipient households (comparison group).Evaluation data has been used to understand how unconditional cash transfers have benefited poor households, communities and through which channels impacts have been realized. Over the four years of the evaluation period, the programme had impacts on household expenditure and poverty, food consumption and increased human capital of school-age children and time preferences of adults. Additionally, during the critical time of youth transitioning to adulthood, the programme delayed sexual debut, reduced the likelihood of early pregnancy and reduced odds of depressive symptoms among youth in beneficiary households. Evaluation findings have contributed to the scale-up of the programme, now reaching over 360,000 households nationally.By making the research data open, the measurement data and the source codes that produced results are now made available. This benefits researchers who can reanalyse the data and the findings, and may even be encouraged to carry out new, innovative research. Providing access to the data also appeals to donors who allocate public funding to research: if the public paid for the data collection, there should be open, public access to this information.Currently, steps are being taken by the Transfer Project to prepare more collected data for release. The Project has recognized from its inception the centrality of openly sharing information to facilitate learning and achieve its goal of informing better design and implementation of social protection programmes. All project partners are committed to the importance of this project as a public good and to the promotion of learning in the region, and beyond. For each of the cash transfer programmes, the project aims to make data, instruments and evaluation reports open and accessible.See the Transfer Project webpage for more information on the Kenya CT-OVC programme and research findings, and the Innocenti webpage for more information on cash transfer work at the Office of Research—Innocenti. 

(9 March 2017) Despite the potential of cash transfers to empower women, the evidence supporting this outcome is not conclusive, especially from programs at scale in sub-Saharan Africa. The authors of a new study, Cash for Women’s Empowerment? A Mixed-Methods Evaluation of the Government of Zambia’s Child Grant Program, have conducted a qualitative and quantitative 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 results show a number of positive linkages between social cash transfers and different measures of women’s empowerment. UNICEF Innocenti researchers, in partnership with the American Institutes for Research and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill authored the paper under the Transfer Project initiative, with support from UNICEF Zambia. The paper was published in the academic journal World Development in advance of International Women’s Day. The quantitative component of the study 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. The 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. Women’s narratives captured through qualitative measures showed the cash transfer increased financial empowerment as they were able to retain control over transfers for household investment and savings for emergencies. “I have also been empowered because of the child grant. I never used to have my own money, but now even as I suggest something to my husband I don’t feel worthless because I have money in my hands. It is my first time to experience such; I am really empowered.” Female, beneficiary, married, age 24 Results show potential for unconditional cash transfer programs to improve the financial and intra-household status of female beneficiaries, however it is likely that additional design components are need for transformational change. The evaluation is of particular interest, as it uses a large-scale, government-run program, instead of temporary pilot program implemented by a non-governmental organization. In addition, the authors are are able to make conclusions based on a relatively long period of programme receipt (four years), therefore overcoming limitations of other studies, which may examine only shorter-term impacts. Finally, the combination of quantitative and qualitative data makes it possible to interrogate the concept of women’s empowerment and assess if quantitative measures of decision making, commonly used in the literature to proxy for bargaining power, are likely to capture the intended concept assigned by researchers. This study is important for governments, policy makers, and program implementers who are engaged in social cash transfers for poverty reduction. On one hand, the study contributes to quantitative evidence that suggests the Zambia Child Grant Program positively affected women’s decision making, however due to existing gender norms, impacts on sole and joint decision making translated into relatively minor actual shifts. In addition, the research highlights methodological challenges associated with equating commonly used decision making quantitative indicators with ‘empowerment’ more broadly. Thus, authors conclude that programmes such as the Child Grant Programme realize beneficial gendered impacts, but fail to shift gender norms in a transformational way.  Read more about Innocenti’s social cash transfer work here, including a blog and research brief on gender and cash transfers.