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Abstract
Increasingly recognized as a critical part of poverty
reduction strategies, social protection systems have
been used to enable individuals, families, and communities
to reduce risk and mitigate the impacts of stresses
and shocks to their livelihoods. They can also be used
to support people who suffer from chronic incapacities
to secure basic subsistence. Furthermore, such interventions
can contribute to broader development processes through
investments in health, nutrition, and education for
children and adults, development of productive infrastructure,
and support for livelihoods activities. In the last
ten years, one type of intervention has swept across
Latin America and is now making its way across the globe:
conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs). These programs
provide a cash transfer to poor households, conditioned
on their participation in health and education services.
At least twenty countries currently have a CCT or are
in the planning stages, with another twenty exploring
the idea. With the rise of CCTs has also come a new
practice of systematically building rigorous program
evaluation into social policy. In many cases, donors
and governments have required that these evaluations
include both quantitative and qualitative research methods.
Drawing on recent experience of the International Food
Policy Research Institute’s evaluations of conditional
cash transfer programs for the governments of Nicaragua
and Turkey, this paper explores how ethnographic and
survey methods have been combined provide representative
measures of impacts on poverty, health, nutrition, education,
and other variables, with in-depth, subtle, explanations
for those changes (or lack of change), and exploration
of social processes and impacts such as effects on gender
and other social relations.
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