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The impact of the Kenya Cash Transfer Program for Orphans and Vulnerable Children on household spending

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/19439342.2011.653980

1943-9342

The Kenya CT-OVC Evaluation Team,

Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics

Abstract The Kenya Cash Transfer Program for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (CT-OVC) is the government's flagship social protection programme, reaching over 130,000 households and 260,000 orphans and vulnerable children across the country as of late 2011. The objective of this paper is to investigate whether the CT-OVC has changed the preferences of households in terms of their consumption behaviour. We compare standard difference-in-differences programme effects with ex-ante expected effects given baseline expenditure elasticities. As a result of the programme, participating households had significantly higher expenditures than control households on food, health, and clothing and significantly less spending on alcohol and tobacco. Programme impacts were also seen on spending in four of seven food groups. To test whether the programme simply moves households along their total expenditure Engel curve or in fact shifts that curve, we compare ex-ante expected behaviours with the ex-post actual response of households to the programme. We find in fact that in about one-half of the consumption categories ex-ante predicted and ex-post actual effects are significantly different, implying that preferences may have changed among programme recipients. We then directly test whether the programme has induced significant changes in expenditure elasticities (as implied by their associated marginal propensities to consume) and find evidence of this for alcohol and tobacco, and to a lesser extent for food, health and transportation and communication. Keywords: cash transferssocial protectionpovertysocial policysub-Saharan Africahousehold spending Acknowledgements The authors thank the following individuals for their contributions to the program and the evaluation: Nils Riemenschneider, Clare O'Brien, Ian MacAuslan and Jack Willis. Notes Disclaimer: The views expressed in the Work are those of the Author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 1. The Kenya CT-OVC Evaluation Team is comprised of (in alphabetical order) Carlos Alviar (UNICEF–Ghana), Benjamin Davis (FAO–Rome), Sudhanshu Handa (University of North Carolina), Alex Hurrell (Oxford Policy Management), Ahmed Hussein (Ministry of Gender, Children & Social Development), Daniel Musembi (Ministry of Gender, Children & Social Development), Samuel Ochieng (Ministry of Gender, Children & Social Development), Tia Palermo (Graduate Program in Public Health, Stony Brook University), Roger Pearson (UNICEF–Ethiopia), Luca Pellerano (Oxford Policy Management), Aly Visram (Oxford Policy Management), and Patrick Ward (Oxford Policy Management). The corresponding author for this article is Tia Palermo. 2. The evaluation of the Kenya CT-OVC was conducted by Oxford Policy Management under contract to UNICEF – Kenya, and data collection was implemented by Research Solutions Africa. The evaluation was overseen by a steering committee comprising technical staff from the Ministry of Gender, Children & Social Development of the Government of Kenya, UNICEF – Kenya, UNICEF-ESARO, DFID and the World Bank. The results that appear in this article are the culmination of over three years of intellectual, technical, financial and operational efforts of a large and dedicated team; authorship is listed jointly to recognise the important contribution of the key individuals in producing the results reported here. Ahmed Hussein is the contact person for the CT-OVC.