Cash Transfers and Climate-resilient Development: Evidence from Zambia’s Child Grant Programme

Cash Transfers and Climate-resilient Development: Evidence from Zambia’s Child Grant Programme

AUTHOR(S)
Kathleen Lawlor; Sudhanshu Handa; David Seidenfeld; Zambia Cash Transfer Evaluation Team

Published: 2015 Innocenti Working Papers
This study investigates whether cash transfers enable households facing weather and other negative income shocks to avoid adverse coping strategies that can lead to poverty traps. While cash transfers are not routinely considered in the policy discourse concerning climate adaptation programming, because ex-ante transfers enable households to avoid negative coping strategies and even increase food consumption in the face of covariate weather shocks, cash transfers offer a sound approach for building climate-resilience amongst the world’s most vulnerable and facilitating their “autonomous adaptation” to a changing environment. Cash also enables households to productively cope with the many other idiosyncratic shocks the rural poor routinely face.
Is there Catch-Up Growth? Evidence from Three Continents

Is there Catch-Up Growth? Evidence from Three Continents

AUTHOR(S)
Sudhanshu Handa; Amber Peterman

Published: 2015 Innocenti Working Papers
The ability to correct childhood malnutrition, or for children to display ‘catch-up growth’, has important population-level implications for economic and social development. According to most recent estimates, over one third of all children under the age of five in developing countries suffer from some form of nutritional deficiency, with approximately 27% classified as underweight, 31% exhibiting stunting and 10% exhibiting wasting. We contribute to the catch-up growth debate by presenting results from three widely varying population based samples using identical statistical techniques, controlling for endogeneity of lagged health in several different ways, and measuring height in z-scores. Our estimates for these three different populations indicate that while previous health does not track future health perfectly, there is still significant persistence in health status for young children. These estimates do not account for household health-related behaviour.
Governance and Policy Coordination: The case of birth registration in Ghana

Governance and Policy Coordination: The case of birth registration in Ghana

AUTHOR(S)
B. Guy Peters; Andrew Mawson

Published: 2015 Innocenti Working Papers
UNICEF identifies coordination as a determinant of results for children, alongside other governance issues such as budgeting, management and legislation. As part of wider analysis of barriers and bottlenecks impeding results, UNICEF Country Offices are encouraged to identify where significant impediments to coordination exist, and to analyze what can be done to address them. But how does one identify and analyze coordination? What are it various components? How is it achieved? Enhancing and strengthening coordination can seem to be the answer, or at least an answer, to improving the translation of policy into practice, strengthening service delivery and, ultimately, getting results for money spent.
Social Networks and Risk Management in Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty Programme

Social Networks and Risk Management in Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty Programme

AUTHOR(S)
Silvio Daidone; Sudhanshu Handa; Benjamin Davis; Mike Park; Robert D. Osei; Isaac Osei-Akoto

Published: 2015 Innocenti Working Papers
Understanding how household consumption, investment and saving decisions respond to transfer income is critical to public policy. In developing countries, saving or otherwise investing in the future is difficult for poor households which often struggle to meet basic expenses, while high debt burdens are also obstacles to saving. Poor households in rural areas of developing countries typically manage risk via informal exchanges or transfers among extended family, friends and neighbours. Motivated by the community dynamics observed in the qualitative assessment of LEAP and the unpredictable and lumpy payments made by the programme during the evaluation period, the main interest of this paper is to assess within a quantitative framework the impact of LEAP on household risk reduction strategies via reintegration in, and strengthening of, social networks and reduction of debt exposure.
Cash Transfers and Child Nutrition: What we know and what we need to know

Cash Transfers and Child Nutrition: What we know and what we need to know

AUTHOR(S)
Richard de Groot; Tia Palermo; Sudhanshu Handa; Amber Peterman; Luigi Peter Ragno

Published: 2015 Innocenti Working Papers
This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the impacts of cash transfer programmes on the immediate and underlying determinants of child nutrition, including the most recent evidence from impact evaluations across sub-Saharan Africa. It adopts the UNICEF extended model of care conceptual framework of child nutrition and highlights evidence on the main elements of the framework – food security, care and health care. It finds that several key gaps should be addressed in future including cash transfer impacts on more proximate nutrition-related outcomes such as children’s dietary diversity, as well as caregiver behaviours, intra-household violence, and stress, all of which have implications for child health and well-being.
The Measurement of Food Insecurity among Children: Review of literature and concept note

The Measurement of Food Insecurity among Children: Review of literature and concept note

AUTHOR(S)
Maryah S. Fram; Jennifer Bernal; Edward A. Frongillo

Published: 2015 Innocenti Working Papers
Child food insecurity is associated with a range of negative developmental consequences, including behaviour problems. While research shows that the phenomenon is both common and consequential, there is a lack of consistency in what is being measured and how. This results in incomplete information affecting our ability to effectively address child food insecurity, its causes and consequences. We present a review of the literature, and advocate for a global system to measure and monitor individual children’s experiences of food insecurity. The conceptual and practical challenges for developing an effective, efficient, and feasible system for global monitoring of child food insecurity are discussed and alternatives are suggested.
Unconditional Government Social Cash Transfer in Africa Does not Increase Fertility

Unconditional Government Social Cash Transfer in Africa Does not Increase Fertility

AUTHOR(S)
Tia Palermo; Sudhanshu Handa; Amber Peterman; Leah Prencipe; David Seidenfeld

Published: 2015 Innocenti Working Papers
In Africa, one of the key barriers to the scale-up of unconditional cash transfer programmes is the notion held by politicians, and even the general public, that such programmes will induce the poor to have more children. The hard evidence on this question is scanty. The current study uses evaluation data from the Zambian Child Grant Programme (CGP), a large-scale UCT targeted to households with a child under the age of five at programme initiation and evaluates the impact of transfers on fertility and child-fostering decisions. The overall goal of the CGP is to reduce extreme poverty and break the intergenerational transmission of poverty. The results contribute to the small literature that rigorously documents the fertility impacts of unconditional cash transfer programmes in developing countries.
Cite this publication | No. of pages: 40 | Thematic area: Social Policies | Tags: cash transfers, economic policy, fertility
Heterogeneous impacts of an unconditioal cash transfer programme on schooling: evidence from the Ghana LEAP programme

Heterogeneous impacts of an unconditioal cash transfer programme on schooling: evidence from the Ghana LEAP programme

AUTHOR(S)
Richard de Groot; Sudhanshu Handa; Mike Park; Robert D. Osei; Isaac Osei-Akoto; Luigi Peter Ragno; Garima Bhalla

Published: 2015 Innocenti Working Papers
The paper uses data from a quasi-experimental evaluation to estimate the impact of the Ghanaian Government’s unconditional cash transfer programme on schooling outcomes. It analyses the impacts for children by various subgroups – age, gender, cognitive ability – and finds consistent impacts. There are differences across gender, especially on secondary schooling, with enrolment significantly higher for boys 13 years or older. For girls, the effect of the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme is to improve current attendance among those who are already enrolled in school (across all age groups). The authors found a significant effect on the expenditure on schooling items such as uniforms and stationary for these groups, which helps to explain the pathway of impact because these out-of-pocket costs are typically important barriers to schooling in rural Ghana and most of Africa.
Cite this publication | No. of pages: 33 | Thematic area: Child Poverty | Tags: cash transfers, ghana, schooling
CC-MODA - Cross Country Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis: Analysing Child Poverty and Deprivation in sub-Saharan Africa

CC-MODA - Cross Country Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis: Analysing Child Poverty and Deprivation in sub-Saharan Africa

AUTHOR(S)
Marlous de Milliano; Ilze Plavgo

Published: 2014 Innocenti Working Papers
Child poverty is defined as non-fulfilment of children’s rights to survival, development, protection and participation, anchored in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. DHS and MICS household survey data is used, taking the child as unit of analysis and applying a life-cycle approach when selecting dimensions and indicators to capture the different deprivations children experience at different stages of their life. The paper goes beyond mere deprivation rates and identifies the depth of child poverty by analysing the extent to which the different deprivations are experienced simultaneously. The analysis is done across thirty countries in sub-Saharan Africa that together represent 78% of the region’s total population. The findings show that 67% of all the children in the thirty countries suffer from two to five deprivations crucial to their survival and development, corresponding to 247 million out of a total of 368 million children below the age of 18 living in these thirty countries.
Pauvreté et privation des enfants au Mali : les premières estimations nationales

Pauvreté et privation des enfants au Mali : les premières estimations nationales

AUTHOR(S)
Marlous de Milliano; Sudhanshu Handa

Published: 2014 Innocenti Working Papers
Le chevauchement entre la pauvreté et les privations touche au total 29 % des enfants, ce qui signifie que les enfants victimes de privations ne vivent pas tous dans des ménages pauvres, c’est-à-dire aux revenus inférieurs au seuil national de pauvreté. C’est dans les zones rurales que la privation et la pauvreté monétaire sont le plus étroitement liées, et ce, pour tous les groupes d’âge. Une augmentation du revenu de 1 dollar par personne et par jour permettrait de réduire de 25 points la probabilité de privations dans les zones rurales.
Household Welfare Measurement in Bangladesh: A tale of two short consumption modules

Household Welfare Measurement in Bangladesh: A tale of two short consumption modules

AUTHOR(S)
Luisa Natali; Chris De Neubourg

Published: 2014 Innocenti Working Papers
Two short consumption modules were piloted in Bogra and Sirajganj (Bangladesh) in May-June 2012 as part of the Global MICS5 Pilot. This paper aims at validating this exercise and assessing the accuracy and reliability of the consumption estimates obtained. The use of a benchmark consumption module is essential in order to assess how well the two short options fare; the analysis therefore consists of a systematic comparison of both short modules with a benchmark. The attempt made is to isolate and test the impact of the length (degree of commodity) of the consumption questionnaire on the quality of consumption and poverty estimates as well as distributional measures obtained. We conclude that it is feasible to include a short consumption module in MICS (Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys).
Child Poverty and Deprivation in Mali: The first national estimates

Child Poverty and Deprivation in Mali: The first national estimates

AUTHOR(S)
Marlous de Milliano; Sudhanshu Handa

Published: 2014 Innocenti Working Papers
In Mali the national child deprivation rate is 50%, slightly higher than the national (monetary) child poverty rate of 46%. The overlap of children who are both poor and deprived is 29% of all children, hence not all children who are deprived are living in poor households as defined by the national poverty line. Only 58% of children who are deprived live in poor households. Similarly, only 62% of children in poor households are multidimensionally deprived. Consequently, policies that are targeted exclusively on monetary poverty will miss children who are deprived.
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