Unconditional Cash Transfers (UCTs) are effective policy instruments to increase schooling outcomes, but are UCTs effective in the long term? This paper provides the first evidence on the long-term schooling impacts of a national cash transfer program in Africa. Specifically, we follow a panel of school-aged children in the Malawi Social Cash Transfer Program (SCTP) in three waves (2013-baseline, 2015-endline, and 2021-follow-up) and compare their schooling outcomes between children randomized to receive transfers early and those randomized to receive the transfers later. In the short-term, we find that school enrollment and highest-grade completion are significantly higher for children in the early treatment group. In the long-term, five years after the late treatment group started receiving transfers, the impacts on highest grade completion persist only for older out-of-school girls. Mobility patterns suggest that the transfers may have delayed marriage of older girls in the early treatment group. For this subgroup, long-term school enrollment is significantly higher for children living closer to a secondary school than those living farther away indicating complementarity between income and school travel costs.

This paper shows that liquidity constraints prevents the poorest households in Malawi from allocating their labor efficiently. Providing cash—with no strings attached—resolve these inefficiencies and boost productivity. Households randomized to receive unconditional cash transfers leverage the transfers to free up their labor to work on their farm and purchase agricultural inputs (including seeds, fertilizer, and implements) needed for agricultural production. These investments lead to higher agricultural output (harvests).

Governments in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have rapidly expanded cash transfer programmes as part of their social protection strategy over the last decade. Currently 46 countries have a state-sponsored social protection programme, compared to just 25 countries in 2005, with the most common type of programme being cash transfers, representing 51% of all social protection spending in the region. We present evidence on the overall impacts of state-sponsored cash transfer programmes in SSA, using data from three impact evaluations of government programmes. All three programmes were a key component of the poverty reduction strategy of the respective governments at the time of the evaluations. We show impacts across nine broad domains including both protection, production and human development, using baseline and follow-up household surveys on Treatment and Control groups. We relate the pattern of impacts to programme design parameters to further understand the constraints faced by ultra-poor rural households. All three programmes have strong effects on their primary objective—food security or food consumption, as well as on secondary objectives that include livelihood strengthening and children’s well-being. The largest and most consistent impacts occur in Malawi, where transfer values are in line with international best practice and payments were made regularly during the study period. All programmes show a positive income multiplier, with the multiplier largest in Malawi at 2.94. The overall results across three national programmes add to the growing evidence from Africa that government unconditional cash transfers have important positive effects on households, that these effects are not limited to just food security, and that programme design features influence the pattern and size of impacts. Results in this article are based on programmes that pass both criteria of implementation feasibility and political acceptability, and thus provide a more accurate reflection of what real-world cash transfer programmes can achieve in SSA.