Zambia
The Impact of Zambia’s Unconditional Child Grant on Schooling and Work
Making Money Work
Can Unconditional Cash Transfers Lead to Sustainable Poverty Reduction?
Are Cash Transfers a Silver Bullet?
Exploring the Potential of Cash Transfers to Delay Early Marriage and Pregnancy among Youth in Malawi and Zambia
There is increasing interest in the potential of cash transfers to facilitate safe transitions to adulthood among vulnerable youth in low-income settings. However little evidence exists that analyses these linkages from at-scale government-run programmes. This brief summarizes the impacts of two government-run large-scale unconditional cash transfers on outcomes of early marriage and pregnancy among youth in Malawi and Zambia after approximately three years. Results indicate limited impacts on safe transitions for both males and females. However the programmes were successful in reducing poverty and improving schooling outcomes—two main pathways for safe transitions as reported in the literature. Research implications include the need to study transitions over longer time periods including tracking of youth as they transition out of study households. If reducing early marriage and pregnancy is among policy makers’ primary priorities then dedicated programming via cash plus or services specifically targeted at addressing the needs of adolescents and youth should be considered.
How Do Cash Transfers Affect Child Work and Schooling? Surprising evidence from Malawi, the United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia
Cash transfers supplement household income but can they also reduce child labour? With generous funding from the United States Department of Labor researchers at the UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti evaluated the impact of three large-scale government cash transfer programmes to answer this question.
Cash for Women’s Empowerment?
Cash Transfers and Child Nutrition in Zambia
We examine the effect of the Zambia Child Grant Programme – an unconditional cash transfer (CT) targeted to rural families with children under age five – on height-for-age four years after programme initiation. The CT scheme had large positive effects on several nutritional inputs including food expenditure and meal frequency. However there was no effect on height-for-age. Production function estimates indicate that food carries little weight in the production of child height. Health knowledge of mothers and health infrastructure in the study sites are also very poor. These factors plus the harsh disease environment are too onerous to be overcome by the increases in food intake generated by the CT. In such settings a stand-alone CT even when it has large positive effects on food security is unlikely to have an impact on long-term chronic malnutrition unless accompanied by complementary interventions.