The Impact of Zambia’s Unconditional Child Grant on Schooling and Work: Results from a large-scale social experiment

Since the mid 1990s, and following the successful implementation of large scale programmes in Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, cash transfers have become an important part of the poverty alleviation toolkit in developing countries, even among the poorest where, for many, such programmes seemed both administratively complex or simply unaffordable. The ‘African model’ of cash transfers has several distinguishing features which differentiate it from those in Latin America. In this article we take advantage of the unconditional nature of the Zambian CGP, which targets families with very young children and whose objectives are focused on their health and development, to see if the programme has an impact on the schooling and work of school-age children who in principle are not the main target population of the programme. We use data from a large-scale social experiment involving 2,500 households, half of whom were randomized out to a delayed-entry control group, which was implemented to assess the impact of the programme.