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Several developing economies have recently introduced conditional cash transfer programs, which provide money to poor families contingent on certain behavior, usually investments in human capital, such as sending children to school or bringing them to health centers. Evaluation results for programs launched in Colombia, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Turkey reveal successes in addressing many of the failures in delivering social assistance, such as weak poverty targeting, disincentive effects, and limited welfare impacts. Many questions remain unanswered, however, including the…
Conditional cash transfers are a departure from more traditional approaches to social assistance that represents an innovative and increasingly popular channel for the delivery of social services. Conditional cash transfers provide money to poor families contingent upon certain behavior, usually investments in human capital such as sending children to school or bringing them to health centers on a regular basis. They seek both to address traditional short-term income support objectives, as well as to promote the longer-term accumulation of human capital by serving as a demand-side complement…
No one wants children to suffer the harshness of life in poverty. This can drive some parents to entrust their children to an orphanage or to work in domestic service. It can lead some social workers to remove children from a home because their family is poor. There are times when these are the best options available: the children will be better fed and the parents may have the time to overcome a crisis and build a more stable home. Outcomes are far worse when children leave of their own accord and end up on their own in the streets. But even in the best of…