Conditional Cash Transfer (CCTs) programs are a fast growing part of safety net policy. This section of the website summarizes recent program experiences and provides additional resources on the operational experiences to date.
Conditional Cash Transfer programs provide cash payments to poor households that meet certain behavioral requirements, generally related to children’s health care and education.
The first generation of conditional cash transfers (mostly in Latin American middle income countries) have been marked by good implementation with respect to targeting, general administration and impact evaluation. From these programs we learn that well designed and implemented CCT programs can have a wide range of good outcomes, e.g. efficient targeting, increased food consumption and improved school enrollment.
The programs are, of course, not a panacea. They generate full synergies between social assistance and human capital development only where the supply of health and education services is extensive and of reasonable quality. They can also be administratively demanding. Both household targeting systems and the monitoring of compliance are data intensive, and the programs involve extensive coordination across agencies, and often levels of government.
More recent pilot adaptations are testing CCT’s in a diverse range of settings, in a growing list of low income countries, in urban settings (including the U.S. context), and for more specialized purposes. We would expect that as programs are implemented in more diverse circumstances and of more variable quality, impacts will also become more variable.
World Bank – Conditional Cash Transfer
MIT – What are the economic impacts of conditional cash transfer programmes?
Conditional Cash Transfers in New York City
UNICEF – Transformative Transfers: Evidence from Liberia’s Social Cash Transfer Programme
World Bank – Conditional Cash Transfers: Reducing Present and Future Poverty
World Bank – New York City’s New Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) Program
World Bank Approves New Funding for Philippines’ Social Safety Net
Brazil: Bolsa Familia Program – Scaling-up Cash Transfers for the Poor
New York City Will Stop Paying the Poor for Good Behavior
New findings on New York City’s conditional cash transfer program
Mayor Bloomberg Announces Early Findings Of Nation’s First-ever Conditional Cash Transfer Program
Mexico’s Oportunidades Program Fails to Make the Grade in NYC
Princeton University – Policy Brief: Impacts of Unconditional Cash Transfers
Innovations for Poverty Action – Moving Beyond Conditional Cash Transfers in the Dominican Republic
New York Times – To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor
Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino National Program
Ideas for India – Improving maternal and child health through conditional cash transfers
Vox – Mexico tried giving poor people cash instead of food. It worked
National Center for Policy Analysis – The Case for Conditional Cash Transfers in the United States
Kellogg Foundation – Conditional Cash Transfer Grant
Reuters – More lessons from paying people to be less poor
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis – Mexico’s Oportunidades Program Fails to Make the Grade in NYC
Mother Jones – Did This City Bring Down Its Murder Rate by Paying People Not to Kill?
The Guardian – A radical approach to gun crime: paying people not to kill each other
Can Conditional Cash Transfers Reduce Poverty and Crime? Evidence from Brazil
Quartz – The surprisingly simple economic case for giving refugees cash, not stuff
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