In the remarkable expansion of anti-poverty transfer programmes in developing countries in the last decade, human development income transfer programmes, popularly known as conditional cash transfers, have played a very significant role. Their corefeature combines income transfers to households...

In a comparatively short period of time, programmes providing direct transfers in cash and in kind to households in poverty have expanded to reach between 740 million and 1 billion people in the South. The book Social Assistance in Developing Countries provides a comprehensive account of the...