Background
Chronic poverty, which is often transmitted from generation to generation, remains a major challenge for the international community. Recent estimates suggest that between 320 and 443 million people in developing countries are trapped in a chronic state of human deprivation, from which they are unlike to escape in the absence of institutional assistance1.
The nature and proximate causes of chronic poverty are complex and diverse. They include inter alia extreme deficits in well being, inaccessibility to labour and credit markets, social discrimination and high levels of insecurity. Social transfer programmes are emerging as a core component within social protection strategies aimed at tackling poverty and vulnerability. Their ability to reach the targeted population (often those in extreme poverty), capacity to reach large scale, flexibility in scope, as well as an increasing body of empirical work pointing to significant impacts on poverty and well being, is attracting the attention of multilateral institutions and most importantly, many governments in developing countries.
Social transfer programmes are being piloted (or in the design stage) in several countries, e.g. Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana, Bangladesh and Pakistan, whereas other nations have already began rolling out their schemes, e.g. Paraguay, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina, and the Dominican Republic. This is clearly indicating a general interest in social transfers as a potentially effective poverty policy device.
The focus of many social transfer programmes on extreme poverty suggests that they could have important effects in reducing persistent poverty. The 2005 Manchester Conference on Social Protection for the Poorest, the publications and research that followed it (Special Issue on Chronic Poverty and Social Protection in European Journal of Development Research 17(1) March 2005 and A. Barrientos and D. Hulme Social Protection for the Poor and Poorest, Palgrave 2008), as well as the 2008 CPRC Uganda Conference on Social Protection helped assemble a range of research supporting this proposition. This research project aims to contribute to the knowledge on the effectiveness of social transfers in reducing persistent poverty.