Cash Transfers and Adolescent Welfare (Malawi)

Wikimedia Commons. Author: John Duffell

Adolescent girls in developing countries are considered to be an important target group for policymakers. Targeted interventions for this group may not only affect their welfare directly, but they also have the potential to bring benefits to future generations. This paper investigates whether one such intervention, the Zomba Cash Transfer Program in Malawi, helped empower adolescent girls in the short-run. Summarizing evidence from multiple papers examining the impacts of this program on a broad range of outcomes and providing some new analysis here, this paper suggests that the answer is a clear ‘yes.’ The program effectively increased access to financial resources, increased schooling outcomes, decreased teen pregnancies and early marriages, improved health, and generally enabled beneficiaries to improve their agency within their households. (p. 21).

That is from the conclusions of a paper by Sarah J. Baird, Ephraim Chirwa, Jacobus de Hoop, and Berk Özler. 

And more

The CCT program changed some common socioeconomic patterns that affect young women in Malawi, as it induced beneficiaries to delay childbearing and marriage. There is some evidence that these changed socioeconomic patterns are accompanied with changed marital and fertility preferences, suggesting that empowering adolescent women may not only increase their bargaining power within future relationships, but it may also affect the type of relationship they enter into in the first place. (p. 22).

The paper also examines Unconditional Cash Transfers (UCT), if you look at page 19 you will see that CT and UCT affect outcomes differently. Both seems very positive, but their effects on education and other indicators (such as pregnancy, etc.) are different. 

In general the evidence I have seen so far is very positive in favor of CT and UCT. And that is a kind of area where negative results are also interesting and important not only academically but from the policy point of view, so I do no think there is much publication bias, although we need consider that possibility. 

The economics of marital power (Malawi)

This paper argues that wives in developing countries use domestic labour as a tool to incentivise husbands, especially when they lack power and cannot credibly threaten divorce. In Malawi, husbands often supplement farm income with wage labour. In our model, this creates moral hazard: husbands may not make su¢ cient e§ort to bring home wages. Wives use di§erent tools to incentivise husbands. They either threaten them with divorce or alter their domestic labour. Our theory predicts that wives who would be hurt badly by divorce resort to using domestic labour as a source of power. Others, having better "outside options", use a combination of the two or only divorce threat. We conÖrm this prediction using survey data from Malawi. IdentiÖcation is based on the fact that Malawiís kinship traditions exogenously determine outside options. Wives in patrilineal cultures (with low outside options) react to good consumption outcomes by signiÖcantly increasing domestic labour and reducing leisure, whereas matrilineal wives do not. The e§ect is particularly strong for patrilineal wives with no natal land inheritance. This suggests that land inheritance is a crucial determinant of the accessibility of divorce to women in Malawi.

That is from a new working paper by Selma Telalagic (Oct. 2012).  

Conditional Cash Transfers and HIV/AIDS

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have recently received considerable attention as a potentially innovative and effective approach to the prevention of HIV/AIDS. We evaluate a conditional cash transfer program in rural Malawi which offered financial incentives to men and women to maintain their HIV status for approximately one year. The amounts of the reward ranged from zero to approximately 3–4 months wage. We find no effect of the offered incentives on HIV status or on reported sexual behavior. However, shortly after receiving the reward, men who received the cash transfer were 9 percentage points more likely and women were 6.7 percentage points less likely to engage in risky sex. Our analyses therefore question the “unconditional effectiveness” of CCT program for HIV prevention: CCT Programs that aim to motivate safe sexual behavior in Africa should take into account that money given in the present may have much stronger effects than rewards offered in the future, and any effect of these programs may be fairly sensitive to the specific design of the program, the local and/or cultural context, and the degree of agency an individual has with respect to sexual behaviors.

Source: a paper by Kohler and Thornton (2012), a draft is here. The title is "Conditional Cash Transfers and HIV/AIDS Prevention: Unconditionally Promising?"

Malawi graph of the day

Estimation of HIV incidence in Malawi from cross-sectional population-based sero-prevalence data:

The graphs are from this paper by Misiri et al. 

Understanding food crisis

The case of Malawi. In this article Ellis and Manda (World Development, 2012) argue that  food crisis are the result of market forces and government policies. Nothing new here. The richness is in the details however and the authors do a good job at explaining them. 

In page 1414 they say referring to the market: 

In seeking to understand how this particular pathology keeps replicating itself every few years in Malawi, a first point to note is that market prices are the most accurate single indi- cator of the true maize availability position in Malawi at dif- ferent points of the year. The maize market in Malawi is fundamentally a competitive market, with plentiful and di- verse traders operating in it, and efficient spatial arbitrage reflecting local surpluses or scarcities (Myers, 2008). The mar- ket price is a more accurate predictor than production esti- mates that seem to have performed variably in indicating the true volume of maize available from the domestic harvest from year to year. However, the market price is not utilized as a crit- ical indicator in food security analysis in Malawi. Rather the emphasis is on the forecast maize harvest figure, the crop esti- mates for substitute foods (rice, cassava), the stock position, food aid operations, and localized vulnerability identified by MVAC investigatory procedures.

And to the government:

Second, most government reflex action exacerbates sea- sonal price instability in a deficit market as predicted by the “Jayne hypothesis” stated in the introduction to this paper (Jayne et al., 2006). Aggressive procurement by ADMARC or NFRA in a short market increases upward price pressures when supply is limited. Prohibiting private trade has the same effect, since it reduces spatial arbitrage, and reduces the volume of informal cross-border trade (handled entirely by private traders). In all maize shortage episodes of the 2000s, cross-border import trade helped diminish the shortage of domestic supply to a significant degree. In all episodes government openly charged the private sector with excess stock holding (“hoarding”), and efforts to get this stock released through punitive action failed to add significantly to supply.

The article is here.