The Malawi Social Cash Transfer (SCT) scheme is part of a wave of social protection programmes providing cash to poor households in order to reduce poverty and hunger and promote child education and health. This paper looks beyond the protective function of such programmes, analysing their...

The conditional cash transfer revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean, beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing to this day, heralded a new prominence and acceptance of applying rigorous impact evaluations to social programmes. Over the last decade, sub-Saharan Africa has begun its own...

Social transfers are increasingly seen as a key tool in east and southern Africa for combating the triple threat of chronic poverty, hunger and HIV. In designing programmes, targeting has emerged as a contentious issue in the region. Compared with other regions, programmes in sub-Saharan Africa...

The success of Mexico's conditional cash transfer programme (Progresa) has sparked a wave of similar programmes across the developing world, and the highly successful social experiment in Progresa has created demand for experimental evaluations among development partners, multilateral agencies...