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AUTHOR(S) Yekaterina Chzhen, David Gordon, Sudhanshu Handa
AUTHOR(S) Lucia Ferrone, Marlous de Milliano
AUTHOR(S) Yekaterina Chzhen, Zlata Bruckauf, Emilia Toczydlowska, Frank Elgar, Conception Moreno-Maldonado, Gonneke W.J.M. Stevens, Dagmar Sigmudova, Geneviève Gariépy
AUTHOR(S) Jacobus de Hoop, Patrick Premand, Furio Rosati, Renos Vakis
AUTHOR(S) Richard de Groot, Tia Palermo, Sudhanshu Handa, Luigi Peter Ragno, Amber Peterman
Childhood malnutrition remains a significant global problem, with an estimated 162 million children under the age of five suffering from stunted growth. This article examines the extent to which cash transfer programmes can improve child nutrition. It adopts a framework that captures and explains the pathways and determinants of child nutrition. The framework is then used to organize and discuss relevant evidence from the impact evaluation literature, focusing on impact pathways and new and emerging findings from sub-Saharan Africa to identify critical elements that determine child nutrition outcomes as well as knowledge gaps requiring further research, such as children's dietary diversity, caregiver behaviours and stress.
AUTHOR(S) Carolyn Huang, Kavita Singh, Sudhanshu Handa, Carolyn Halpern, Audrey Pettifor, Harsha Thirumurthy
AUTHOR(S) Yekaterina Chzhen, Lucia Ferrone
AUTHOR(S) Amber Peterman, Naomi Neijhoft, Sarah Cook, Tia Palermo
AUTHOR(S) Juan Bonilla, Rosa Castro Zarzur, Sudhanshu Handa, Claire Nowlin, Amber Peterman, Hannah Ring, David Seidenfeld
AUTHOR(S) Jacobus de Hoop, Tia Palermo, Lisa Hjelm, Sudhanshu Handa
Poverty is a chronic stressor that can lead to poor physical and mental health. This study examines whether two similar government poverty alleviation programs reduced the levels of perceived stress and poverty among poor households in Zambia.
Secondary data from two cluster randomized controlled trials were used to evaluate the impacts of two unconditional cash transfer programs in Zambia. Participants were interviewed at baseline and followed over 36 months. Perceived stress among female caregivers was assessed using the Cohen Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). Poverty indicators assessed included per capita expenditure, household food security, and (nonproductive) asset ownership. Fixed effects and ordinary least squares regressions were run, controlling for age, education, marital status, household demographics, location, and poverty status at baseline.
Cash transfers did not reduce perceived stress but improved economic security (per capita consumption expenditure, food insecurity, and asset ownership). Among these poverty indicators, only food insecurity was associated with perceived stress. Age and education showed no consistent association with stress, whereas death of a household member was associated with higher stress levels.
In this setting, perceived stress was not reduced by a positive income shock but was correlated with food insecurity and household deaths, suggesting that food security is an important stressor in this context. Although the program did reduce food insecurity, the size of the reduction was not enough to generate a statistically significant change in stress levels. The measure used in this study appears not to be correlated with characteristics to which it has been linked in other settings, and thus, further research is needed to examine whether this widely used perceived stress measure appropriately captures the concept of perceived stress in this population.