Despite the global decrease over the last two decades, stunting, also called ‘chronic malnutrition’, remains a public health issue affecting almost 150 million children under the age of 5 years globally. Defined by height-for-age, stunting is the consequence of poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation. Programmes and policies target undernutrition globally, and humanitarian and development actors invest great efforts to prevent stunting. This study uses multivariate analysis to examine the impact of financial assistance on the reduction of stunting in a refugee context, focusing on Syrian refugee children under the age of 5 years in Türkiye. Using a unique dataset, the 2018 Turkey Demographic and Health Survey Syrian Migrant Sample (2018 TDHS-SR), the findings indicate that financial assistance significantly reduces the incidence of stunting among refugee children under the control of economic, mother and children, environmental, health-related and nutritional and breastfeeding characteristics. However, having household members generate income is found to be another stronger predictor to reduce stunting. The paper also argues that the nutritional well-being of refugee children might improve if forced migration occurs towards a stable host country/region. In addition, adaptation over time also seems to have a positive influence.

Cash transfer programs are the most common anti-poverty tool in low- and middle-income countries, reaching more than one billion people globally. Benefits are typically targeted using prediction models. In this paper, we develop an extended targeting assessment framework for proxy means testing that accounts for societal sensitivity to targeting errors. Using a social welfare framework, we weight targeting errors based on their position in the welfare distribution and adjust for different levels of societal inequality aversion. While this approach provides a more comprehensive assessment of targeting performance, our two case studies show that bias in the data, particularly in the form of label bias and unstable proxy means testing weights, leads to a substantial underestimation of welfare losses, disadvantaging some groups more than others.

Child nutrition, health and development are closely tied to maternal nutrition, health and well-being. The underlying drivers of poor maternal and child nutritional outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa are structural in nature. These risks include social, economic, and environmental factors that together compound vulnerability to poor outcomes. Poverty, as a driver of poor maternal and child health outcomes, is an important determinant that is both a cause and a consequence of malnutrition. The United Nations’ Children’s Fund (UNICEF)’s conceptual model for determinants of maternal and child nutrition outcomes released in 2020, is the agency’s latest iteration of child nutrition frameworks. The model identifies the underlying causes of malnutrition as extending beyond food and diets, to include household level dynamics, maternal factors, and the external environment. The manuscript discusses UNICEF’s conceptual model and its applicability in sub-Saharan Africa. It also considers the evidence on interventions aimed at addressing maternal and child nutrition in the region and the location of social protection among these policy tools, with a special focus on the extent to which these resonate with the conceptual model. It concludes by considering the conditions required for social protection instruments to work in the region and similar settings in the Global South. In this way, the manuscript provides a critical reflection about the role of social protection as a nutrition-sensitive instrument in sub-Saharan Africa, in the context of maternal and child nutrition outcomes.

Cash transfers have changed the way the humanitarian sector delivers assistance, and at the same time, digitalization is changing the way our world works in fundamental ways. The digitalization of cash means that the simple click of a button can put money in the hands of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people within minutes. Digital payments have been a game changer, opening the door to faster and more efficient delivery of life-saving assistance. Although physical currency will not disappear with the rise of digital payments, it is essential to balance the benefits of these digital processes with the risks. As humanitarians, we need to articulate what “do no harm” means in the digital age, applying this equally to the way we use digital payments to support people affected by armed conflicts and other situations of violence.

It has been demonstrated that irrationality reduces the efficiency of individuals’ allocations, as measured by their “true” or rational preferences. There is also evidence that poverty increases irrationality of different sorts. As a result, the net benefit to society of a cash transfer from taxpayers to welfare recipients may not be zero. The fact that the transfer will be allocated less efficiently by the recipients than by the taxpayers will reduce the value of the transfer, while if the transfer increases recipients’ rationality, it will increase the efficiency of the allocation of their pretransfer budgets, thus increasing the value of the transfer. The net effect on society will be positive or negative, depending in large part on the degree to which the transfer increases rationality. I model these effects in the context of present-biased preferences and explore the effect of irrationality, income, and the size of transfer on the value of transfers. I conclude that under a plausible range of conditions, transfers can generate a substantial positive net benefit. I also model the choices of a fully rational paternalist and find little support for paternalistic in-kind transfers.

Over the last few years, there has been an increase in discussions advocating in-cash programmes as a way to alleviate poverty. Indeed, this represents a leap forward in comparison to in-kind programmes. However, little progress, at least in developing countries, has been achieved in answering the question of how the state should transfer the means of redressing deprivation to those who are living in poverty. This article addresses this issue by challenging anti-poverty programmes through a social-egalitarian framework. My main argument starts from the perspective that in-cash transfers are a necessary but not sufficient mechanism for poverty alleviation. I acknowledge that cash alone does not guarantee the poor an equally active role in influencing the public-policy decisions that affect their lives. I then suggest a participatory device to complement the cash-transfer proposal in order to give institutional opportunities to the poor to decide, together with practitioners, what should be done at the level of local public services.

The paper presents the effects of Mexico’s conditioned cash-transfers programme (PROSPERA programme, formerly Oportunidades) on household poverty in the Northeast urban areas. The estimate was calculated using the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke Index. We use three poverty lines (i.e. food, capability, and patrimonial poverty) which costs were established by the National Assessment Council of the Social Development Policy. The results show that, in the three lines, the intensity and inequality of poverty diminished. Regarding incidence, only in extreme poverty was found a significant effect, so, there is no evidence to support that cash transfers help households to escape poverty.

We examine the environmental impacts of a cash transfer program in rural Zambia and investigate whether variation in market access is associated with heterogeneous impacts on natural resource use. We consider households’ use of firewood, charcoal, bushmeat and land for farming, as well as their ownership of non-farm businesses. We find that cash transfers increase the likelihood of charcoal consumption as well as the amount consumed for those living close to paved roads. The transfers also enable households to increase the size of their farms and establish non-farm businesses. These impacts are most pronounced for those living far from paved roads. While remoteness is associated with farm expansion in response to the cash transfer, more education causes those receiving the transfer to decrease the size of their farms. This impact heterogeneity has important implications for sustainable development.

This study explores the evolution of the Green Grants program, run by Brazil’s Ministry of Environment, as a means for developing the concept of bureaucratic activism. When the Workers’ Party first took office in 2003, many social movement actors joined the government, especially in that agency. After 2007, however, most of these activists left the government. At the same time, the ministry substituted thousands of temporary employees for permanent civil servants. Surprisingly, this study finds that these public employees carried forward the environmentalist cause, even when this required contesting the priorities of superiors. Examining their attitudes and practices leads to a definition of activism as the proactive pursuit of opportunities to defend contentious causes. The case study helps to develop this concept and to demonstrate that workers inside bureaucracies can engage in activist behavior. It also explores the effects of bureaucratic activism on environmental policymaking in Brazil.

Using a rigorous, evidence-focused review method, this literature review found eleven relevant studies that directly compare the impacts of cash transfers and remittances on a range indicators of poverty at the household level. The evidence base is small and highly context specific. The external and internal validity of most studies are limited, so the conclusions that can be drawn from this review are tentative. However, in the majority of studies both cash transfers and remittances are shown to have positive impacts on reducing poverty. Overall, remittances seem to have stronger poverty-reducing impacts. There are a number of factors that seem to explain why remittances have a greater effect. In the studies reviewed here, remittances appear to reach both a greater share of the overall population than cash transfers and a greater share of poorer households. Furthermore, remittances were higher in value in the majority of studies reviewed. Further high-quality research is needed.