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RECENT NEWS & ACTIVITIES:
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Happy 2018 to all!
We kick off the year with some good news on new and renewed resources to support the Transfer Project mission of evidence generation, policy influence and sharing knowledge on cash transfers:
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UNC received a three-year grant from the Hewlett Foundation for research translation, policy action and capacity building within the Transfer Project portfolio (PIs, Gustavo Angeles and Ashu Handa).
UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti received a generous Phase 2 three-year grant from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) to provide cross-program support including primary research, dissemination and capacity building. Themes for the upcoming work include: Cash plus evaluation, gender analysis and humanitarian research.
Data Collection Updates
Data for the Zambia CGP 84-month long-term follow up was successfully conducted in October-December 2017 led by Ashu Handa (UNC) and Luisa Natali (UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti) in collaboration with Palm Associates and UNICEF Zambia. This round of evaluation builds off strong short and medium-term impacts to examine their sustainability over time.
Endline data collection was completed for the impact evaluation of a humanitarian pilot cash transfer and referrals program - known as Min-Ila and implemented by UNICEF and WFP - supporting displaced Syrian children in Lebanon.
In Lesotho, data collection for the impact evaluation of the combined Child Grants Programme (CGP) and the Sustainable Poverty Reduction through Income, Nutrition and Access to Government Services (SPRINGS) project was collected in October 2017-January 2018. FAO team composed of Silvio Daidone and Noemi Pace supervised the successful survey of 2,000 and a laboratory experiment in-the-field to measure their risk attitudes on a sub-sample of 450 individuals. Qualitative fieldwork was led by Pamela Pozarny and Zarah Nesbitt-Ahmed. Dissemination of findings to be held in Maseru, Lesotho, in March/April.
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Staff and Research Fellows
Mphatso Kamndaya and Michael Danquah became the newest Transfer Project African early career Research Fellows. We look forward to working with Mphatso and Michael over the next year!
Mphatso Kamndaya is a Senior Lecturer at University of Malawi – The Polytechnic. He holds a PhD in Public Health from the University of the Witwatersrand, where he also completed postdoctoral training. He conducts international empirical research in the area of social science and urban health. He has published on adolescent sexual reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa, including structural drivers of HIV/AIDS among adolescents and young people. Dr. Kamndaya has training in applied statistics and mathematics and conducts both quantitative and qualitative research. He has implemented a number of sexual reproductive health research projects using mixed methods.
Michael Danquah (PhD, Economics) is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Economics, University of Ghana, Legon. Previously, he worked as a Development Policy Analyst at the National Development Planning Commission, Ghana. In 2014, he was awarded the Most Promising Young Scholar at the School of Social Sciences, University of Ghana, Legon. Broadly, Michael’s research has focused on inclusive growth and poverty reduction, economics of education, informality and tax reforms, and efficiency analysis. Over the period of the fellowship with the UNICEF Office of Research - Innocenti, Michael will work on cash transfers and urban poverty, and also on integrating multidimensional child poverty, public finance for children and fiscal incidence analysis.
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Journal Articles & Book Chapters
Bhalla, G., Handa, S., Angeles, G., & Seidenfeld, D. (2018). The effect of cash transfers and household vulnerability on food security in Zimbabwe. Food Policy, 74, 82-99.
de Hoop, J., Friedman, J., Kandpal, E., & Rosati, F. (Forthcoming). Child schooling and child work in the presence of a partial education subsidy. J. Human Resources. 0, 1-46.
Brugh, K., Angeles, G., Mvula, P., Tsoka, M., & Handa, S. (2017). Impacts of the Malawi social cash transfer program on household food and nutrition security. Food Policy, 0, 1-14.
Lawlor, K., Handa, S., Seidenfeld, D., & the Zambia Cash Transfer Evaluation Team. (2017). Cash transfers enable households to cope with agricultural production and price shocks: evidence from Zambia. Journal of Development Studies, 0, 1-18.
Pace, N., Daidone, S., Davis, B., Handa, S., Knowles, H., & Pickmans, R. (2017). One plus one can be greater than two: evaluating synergies of development programmes in Malawi. Journal of Development studies, 0, 1-38.
Asfaw, S. & Davis, B. (2017). Can cash transfer programmes promote household resilience? Cross-country evidence from sub-Saharan Africa. In L. Lipper, N. McCarthy, D. Zilberman, S. Asfaw, & G. Branca (Eds.), Climate smart agriculture: building resilience to climate change (pp. 227-250).
Working and Position Papers
Sabates-Wheeler, R., Abdulai, A-G., Wilmink, N., de Groot, R., & Spadafora, T.R. (2017). Linking social rights to active citizenship for the most vulnerable: the role of rights and accountability in the ‘making’ and ‘shaping’ of social protection. UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti Working Paper WP-2017-14.
Hirvonen, K., Bossuyt, A., & Pigois, R. (2017). Complementarities between social protection and health sector policies: evidence from productive safety net program in Ethiopia. IFPRI Strategy Support Program Working Paper 112.
Winder Rossi, N., Spano, F., Sabates-Wheeler, R., Kohnstamm, S., & Harvey, P. (2017). Supporting Livelihoods in Protracted Crises, Fragile and Humanitarian Contexts. FAO Position paper: I7606.
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Reports
Morey, M., & Seidenfeld, D. (2017). Impact Evaluation of UNICEF’s Let Us Learn Cash Transfer Supplement Programme in Madagascar: Baseline Report. Washington, DC: American Institutes for Research (AIR).
Roelen, K., Devereux, S., & Kebede, D. (2017). Evaluation of the UNICEF Social Cash Transfer Pilot Programme in SNNPR, Ethiopia: Midline report. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
Roelen, K., Devereux, S., Kebede, D., & Ulrichs, M. (2017). Cash ‘plus’ - Integrated Nutrition and Social Cash Transfer (IN-SCT) Pilot in Ethiopia: perceptions and feedback from clients and service providers: Research report. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
Thoreux, M., Bichard, A., Ndiaye, S., Souza, D., & Pozarny, P. (2017). Perspectives pour renforcer la résilience et les moyens de subsistance des ménages ruraux: Senegal, Études de cas: régions de Fatick et Tambacounda. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Vinci, I. (2017). Harnessing the role of rural organizations in social protection: An inventory of practices. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Nesbitt-Ahmed, Z., Pozarny, P., & de la O Campos, A.P. (2017). Qualitative research on the impacts of social protection on rural women’s economic empowerment: The Malawi Social Cash Transfer Programme country case study report. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Briefs
The Malawi Cash Transfer Evaluation Team. (2017). Malawi's Social Cash Transfer Programme: a comprehensive summary of impacts. Transfer Project Research Brief 2017-03. Chapel Hill, NC: Carolina Population Center, UNC-Chapel Hill.
The Malawi Cash Transfer Evaluation Team. (2017). The Malawi Social Cash Transfer Programme increases household resiliency. Transfer Project Research Brief 2017-04. Chapel Hill, NC: Carolina Population Center, UNC-Chapel Hill.
The Malawi Cash Transfer Evaluation Team. (2017). The importance of understanding and monitoring the effects of cash transfer programs on child labour and education: findings from Malawi. Transfer Project Research Brief 2017-05. Chapel Hill, NC: Carolina Population Center, UNC-Chapel Hill.
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Conferences & Presentations
Tia Palermo presented on evidence and programming on “Cash Plus for adolescents” to the Ministry of Women and Child at Workshop on “Supporting Transition from Childhood To Adulthood: Investing in the Demographic Dividend for India” in New Delhi, India on December 15, 2017 (via skype).
Zimbabwe HSCT Endline Evaluation preliminary results workshop, organized by UNICEF Zimbabwe (led by Leon Muwoni, the Chief of Child Protection (OIC)), took place in Harare, Zimbabwe on December 11, 2017. The research team headed by Ashu Handa and Gustavo Angeles disseminated the preliminary results of the endline evaluation to key stakeholders, including participants from UNICEF, DFID, Zimstat, other international development agencies, local NGOs, universities, and more than a dozen attendees from the Government of Zimbabwe.
Tia Palermo participated in a workshop and gave presentations on social protection and cash plus to Sida staff from various embassies across Africa at the Swedish Embassy in Lusaka, Zambia on December 6-7, 2017.
Validation workshop on the results of a simulation study on the reform of Zambia’s major social protection and agricultural national programs was conducted in Lusaka on November 15, 2017. This was preceded by a workshop on the use and interpretation of simulations for policy reforms that took place on November 13-14, 2017.
Jacob de Hoop participated in a webinar for Humanitarian Evidence Week on November 8th that brought together researchers discuss impact evaluation in settings of humanitarian emergency.
Frank Otchere and David Seidenfeld presented at an ‘Economic and Productive Impacts of Anti-Poverty Policy’ panel led by Ashu Handa at the 39th annual APPAM conference in Chicago on November 2-4, 2017. The presenters discussed the potential of social protection programs to lead to productive impacts, including key design elements of such programs characteristics of participants that gain the most economically and that are particularly susceptible to poverty traps.
Jean Dupraz of UNICEF ESARO and Tia Palermo presented in Plenary Session on Child-Sensitive Social Protection at “Putting Children First: Identifying Solutions and Taking Action on Child Poverty and Inequality in Africa” in Addis Ababa on October 23, 2017.
UNICEF Mozambique held a launch of the Cash Transfer Advocacy Kit in Maputo, Mozambique on October 20, 2017. Andrea Rossi presented ‘Derrubando Mitos: Confrontação entre seis percepções comuns sobre transferências em dinheiro incondicionais como estratégia de redução da pobreza’ (‘Myth-busting: Confronting six common misperceptions about unconditional cash transfers as strategies for poverty reduction’) at the event.
Ashu Handa presented a keynote address, titled ‘What we have learned from the Transfer Project’ at the Global Social Development Innovations (GDSI) Launch and Symposia in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA on October 11-13, 2017. Presentation recording are available here.
Valeria Groppo presented work in progress examining the effects of cash transfer programs in Malawi and Zambia on child labor at the SITES IDEAS conference in Rome. Jacob de Hoop presented the same work at the 2017 NEUDC Conference.
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UPCOMING
Transfer Project researchers from UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti, University of North Carolina, ISSER, and Navrongo Health Research Centre will be presenting endline findings from the LEAP 1000 mixed method impact evaluation to government officials and stakeholders in March 2018 in Accra, Ghana.
The next Transfer Project workshop will be held in early 2019. More information will be shared shortly.
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LATEST BLOGS, INTERVIEWS & OP-EDs
Did you know? Our Infographic busting myths about cash transfers is now available in 8 languages: English, Spanish, Portoguese, French, Malagasy, Chinese, Russian and Arabic!
Tia Palermo discusses the cash plus evaluation in Tanzania podcast, found here.
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