Can Conditional Cash Transfer (CCTs) Programs Play a Greater Role in Reducing Child Undernutrition?

Conditional Cash Transfers programs — which grant cash to poor families provided they make specified investments in the human capital of their children—have been championed as an effective intervention for social protection. Some CCTs include requirements (called conditionalities) related to health and nutrition. Yet while there is evidence indicating that some CCTs have improved the nutritional status of beneficiary children, there has been little commentary on the potential for CCTs to make a greater contribution to improving nutritional status, nor on the programmatic and contextual issues affecting their ability to do so.
 
This paper finds that where utilization of nutrition interventions is low, there is significant potential for CCTs to play a greater role in reducing undernutrition by encouraging groups at high risk of undernutrition to utilize effective nutrition services and by encouraging improved quality of these services. Several key design modifications—e.g. limiting CCT eligibility to the “window of opportunity” for nutrition impact, prioritizing nutrition-related conditionalities based on best practices in nutrition, increasing attention to supply-side investments for nutrition and health services, and improving coordination with other agencies and stakeholders — could allow CCTs to better contribute to eliminating child undernutrition in the developing world. At the same time, there is much to be learned about the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of various design options, as well as their appropriateness in different country contexts.