Publications

The majority of cash transfers in developing countries focus on conditional cash transfers and typically include beneficiary co-responsibilities as a condition for receiving transfers, such as children’s school attendance or growth-monitoring visits. However, in sub-Saharan Africa cash transfer programmes are mostly unconditional, and have the potential to impact households across a wider range of social and productive domains. This Brief summarizes the Zambian Child Grant Programme and looks at the impacts on recipient households.

One of the essential elements of an impact evaluation is that it not only measures or describes changes that have occurred but also seeks to understand the role of particular interventions (i.e., programmes or policies) in producing these changes. This process is known as causal attribution. In impact evaluation, there are three broad strategies for causal attribution: 1) estimating the counterfactual; 2) checking the consistency of evidence for the causal relationships made explicit in the theory of change; and 3) ruling out alternative explanations, through a logical, evidence-based process. The ‘best fit’ strategy for causal attribution depends on the evaluation context as well as what is being evaluated.