This report reviews the evidence on conditional cash transfers (CCTs)—safety net programs that have become popular in developing countries over the last decade. It concludes that CCTs generally have been successful in reducing poverty and encouraging parents to invest in the health and education of their children.
The report looks at a range of low- and middle-income countries; large and small programs; and those that work at local, regional, and national levels. Despite differences, all CCTs transfer cash while asking beneficiaries to make prespecified investments in child education and health. Key indicators, including levels of consumption, school enrollment, and health care visits, all increased among CCT recipients. However, final outcomes such as academic achievement and height for age were more mixed.
The Africa Commission, which first convened in April of 2008, spent the past year focusing on youth, employment and economic growth to develop new and creative strategies with the aim of revitalizing and strengthening cooperative international development. On May 6th the Commission released its final report of recommendations and initiatives.
The report describes the need for 5 specific initiatives in reaching African goals of economic development and youth strengthening:
- Benchmarking African Competitiveness
- Access to Investment Finance for Small and Medium Enterprises
- Unleashing African Entrepreneurship
- Access to Sustainable Energy
- Promoting Post-Primary Education and Research
The USAID-funded Community Action Program (CAP) III builds upon the successes of CAP I and II in strengthening local government institutions and grassroots democracy in Iraq. ACDI/VOCA and its sub-partner, International City/County Management Association (ICMA), are implementing CAP III in four of Iraq’s northern provinces: Kirkuk, Salah ad Din, Diyala and Ninawa. The goal of CAP III is to increase the ability of local government to identify, articulate and better meet the needs of its constituency.
The program’s objectives are:
- Communities better articulate their needs and mobilize resources within and outside the community to solve common problems;
- Local executive and representative government in CAP communities better meet articulated needs of the community; and
- Civilian victims of conflict assisted by the Marla Ruzicka Innocent Victims of War Fund.
Meeting the needs of local youth is important to achieving these objectives, so CAP III incorporates several youth components:
- Apprenticeship Programs for Youth in Private/Public Sector
The Apprenticeship Program was designed and implemented under the previous CAP programs to improve youth workforce capacity in areas of high youth unemployment. The apprenticeship program currently provides short-term jobs in combination with on-the-ground training for over 460 youth between 18 and 24 years old who are graduates of technical institutes and universities.
Under CAP III, supervisors are being trained in how to mentor and coach apprentices, which improves employers’ human resource management. This addresses the needs of youth in the community, and also has the benefit of strengthening human resource capacity within the local government, which will be critical as local government becomes more decentralized. In addition, CAP III is introducing an apprenticeship program targeted at public health outreach. Through this program, young graduates, will assist health specialists in developing outreach and training materials targeting maternal and child health, water-borne diseases, and other community-identified critical public health issues.
- Youth Civic Action and Governance Summer Camps
ACDI/VOCA will conduct two Youth Civic Action and Governance Summer camps for a total of 120 youth in the summer of 2009. The camps will bring together male and female youth from all four provinces who represent diverse ethnicities to engage them in activities that will teach community governance strategies through active simulation and participation. Through the camps, youth will be exposed to both diversity and commonalities among themselves, and they will learn how to effectively use conflict-mitigation strategies, team-building, and advocacy strategies as responsible citizens.
- Development of Youth Community Action Groups (CAGs)
Under CAP II, the Quratoo Community Action Group in northern Diyala developed a strong focus on advocating for youth issues and developing youth leadership. It formed a Youth Action CAG, predominantly composed of men and women under 30 years of age who work in the public sector as teachers and government employees, to support and inform its work with and for young people. Currently, the Quratoo CAG focuses on promoting and advocating youth leadership to their sub-district council and higher levels of government.
Brandie Maxwell
bmaxwell@acdivoca.org
October 2008 - March 2010
Aflatoun is a Dutch non-profit organization focused on social and financial education for children between the ages of 6-14 years. The Aflatoun program is currently operational in 22 countries reaching over 500,000 children (approximately 200,000 of which have started either individual or group savings accounts), and program materials have been translated into 11 languages.
As we’ve grown, we have struggled to find a meaningful, accurate and cost-reasonable way of measuring our work and our impacts. That process is the subject of this post.
Aflatoun's aim is to help children learn to believe in themselves, understand their rights and responsibilities, save money, plan and budget, and even start their own school-based social and micro enterprises. We take a multi-faceted approach: providing our partners an educational programme for children, advocating for policy change in the area of Child Social and Financial Education, and coordinating a network of like-minded organizations and stakeholders.
In our early days, we tried a number of conventional evaluation techniques to track and measure our effectiveness but became increasingly frustrated with them. We didn’t feel these tools were able to properly disaggregate the value of the different streams of work we were doing. In response, we began exploring the emerging field of Social Return on Investment (SROI), because it seemed to offer a common format for analysing and valuing different endeavours. We’ve now been working to complete a SROI calculation for our work since 2005.
What we see as the key innovation here – and how this differs from a cost-benefit analysis approach – is that SROI aims to capture and value the social benefits of a particular intervention and report these in relation to more conventional financial returns. For example, SROI ratio of 2:1 indicates that for every dollar invested by an organisation two dollars of value – economic and social – are generated. Pretty appealing concept, huh?
It’s not easy to execute though. The historic difficult with using SROI analysis has been twofold:
- How to do the actual calculation of a Social Return on Investment
- How to do methodologically sound valuations of social returns
Since 2005, we have committed ourselves to overcoming these, working in partnership with two initiatives based in the Netherlands: socialevaluator.eu, a new social venture developing a web-based SROI calculation tool and Context International Cooperation, which has been doing pilot evaluations with 10 NGOs in developing countries using community members to do SROI calculations (an approach we like because it enables target beneficiaries to value programmes).
When we began working on our SROI calculation, it was an early attempt to put a value on the different types of work that we were doing and to analyse them in a common format. The process now allows all our work to be assessed based on the inputs that we put in. This contribution-based approach has required us to both budget and manage our organizational efforts in line with a well-defined strategic plan. In essence, the activities and cost structure of the organization have had to be aligned with the activities that are actually being performed. This gives us a clear idea of all our inputs, both in terms of both finance and labour, towards all of our organizational goals. It has also required us to keep track of the costs of implementation for our partners on a per child basis.
In the coming months, we will be doing a SROI calculation for both our work as a secretariat with socialevaluator.eu and adapting the participatory approach developed with Context for our partners to do for their programmes, starting with International Child Support this summer.
We expect these experiments to go well and enable us to improve our performance monitoring and better understand the different value we create through our work for both our partners and the children they support. We hope to be able to update CYES as we progress and, in the mean time, would be excited to hear from others working with similar tools and are happy to help anyone moving into this area.
