Impacts of Social Protection Programmes on Children’s Resources and Wellbeing: Evidence from Ethiopia

Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) is Africa’s second largest social protection programme; it has public works (PW) and direct support (DS) components. This study evaluates the impacts of PSNP and related ‘allied’ transfers on children’s bargaining power proxied by child resource shares and wellbeing (monetary poverty, undernutrition and multidimensional deprivation). Inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment, which also controls for other correlates of outcome variables, provides the average treatment effect on the treated with alternative specifications and propensity score matching methods used to check robustness. Using Ethiopia’s Living Standard Measurement Study (LSMS) dataset of 2013/14, we find that children in households receiving PSNP transfers have slightly lower resource shares and are poorer than those in non-recipient families. In contrast, children in allied transfers are less poor and less deprived multidimensionally. Under-seven children in families getting PW transfers are more stunted than their counterparts in non-PW families. Lending some support to previous evidence that when women receive exogenous transfers child outcomes improve, we also find that children in male-headed households with PW have lower resource shares and are more stunted while child poverty in single-mother households is slightly lower. The undesirable results may be attributed to inequality in intrahousehold resource allocation, parental labour requirements by the PW and insufficient transfers which require revisions to consider children’s needs.