A Post-Revolutionary Egyptian Tragedy: Nancy Okail and the Case of NGOs vs. the People of Egypt.

By Naysan Adlparvar

For most doctoral students in International Development the three or four years spent undertaking a PhD can feel like a prison sentence. I, and my fellow PhD colleagues at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), spend the majority of our time confined to a desk and only get ‘let out’ for a period of intensive fieldwork. As we finally begin to throw off the shackles of the PhD, submitting the draft of our thesis, we ask ourselves what impact our work has had, if any, in the wider world. We ask ourselves, ‘what next?’ I’m sure when Nancy Okail, a recent IDS doctoral graduate, asked herself these questions she didn’t expect to be facing a real prison sentence while standing inside a cage in an Egyptian courtroom.

I first met Nancy when I started my PhD in the autumn of 2008. Already halfway through her own PhD, she struck me as intelligent, reflective and deeply committed. When she finished her doctorate Nancy chose not to follow the usual route into academia but wanted to return home to Egypt to contribute to the post-Mubarak efforts to strengthen democracy.

In August 2011 Nancy took up a post as Freedom House’s Egypt Country Director to oversee a programme aimed at promoting democracy, human rights and a free media. Yet, shortly after arriving in Egypt she and other colleagues at Freedom House faced harassment and intimidation from the interim military-led authorities. At the same time a smear campaign was spread by the state-run media, suggesting that foreign funded non-government organisations (NGOs) were working to destabilise the country. Then in December the Egyptian authorities raided the offices of a number of foreign-funded NGOs involved in democratisation, including that of Freedom House. Nancy and 42 other staff members, including 17 Americans, from a number of NGOs were arrested. They were charged with working with funds received from a foreign government without a license. This charge carries a sentence of five years incarceration and such a ruling can only be given with evidence of intent to ‘overthrow the status quo’. Bearing in mind that numerous civil society organisations operate without a license in Egypt and that these laws are used by the Egyptian authorities to manipulate the NGOs working in Egypt, the case is clearly highly political in nature. Follow this link to read Mariz Tadros’s well-informed analysis of the background and questionable nature of the sentencing.

In March of the following year the Egyptian authorities permitted the 17 American NGO staff members to return home. Following their release the case received significantly less coverage in the international media. For those left behind the situation became increasingly dire. As a result, Nancy and a number of the other Egyptians who had been arrested fled the country. Yet, with the election of the Muslim Brotherhood, led by Mohammed Morsi, in June 2012 hopes were momentarily revived. It was thought this government would pursue a more even-handed line. However, little changed. The case continued in a manner that demonstrated the continued stifling of political freedoms. Last week, after a long and emotional wait, the verdict was finally delivered. Nancy was sentenced in absentia and received a maximum five-year prison term. Listen to Nancy's response to the ruling and what it suggests for Egypt’s political transition here.

Nancy’s case (and that of her 25 Egyptian NGO colleagues) demonstrates the risks for those who choose to support political freedoms and democratisation in the face of state opposition. Moreover, it exemplifies the serious resistance to, if not, lack of positive reform in Egypt’s post-revolutionary political system. There is mounting evidence that the Egyptian government is taking steps to exclude minority groups, to restrict political dissent, and to concentrate power in the hands of the executive branch of government. As I type these words I ask myself, has democracy been served in the wake of the monumental demonstrations seen in Tahrir Square? And, what kinds of political change have these demonstrations stimulated?

I wrote this blog with a simple desire to show solidarity for a previous PhD colleague and to raise awareness about the tragic circumstances she and her fellow Egyptians find themselves in. When I began writing, ‘fellow Egyptians’ referred to the 25 Egyptians charged alongside Nancy in this NGO crackdown. Yet, now, as I reach the end of this blog I realise that the tragedy not only relates to Nancy and her 25 colleagues, but also extends to the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians who demonstrated in Tahrir Square for a more democratic future for their country.

Naysan Adlparvar is a PhD candidate within the IDS Participation, Power and Social Change research team. His research investigates the changing pattern of identity and relations between ethno-sectarian groups in Bamyan, in the Central Highlands of Afghanistan, and assesses how these relations were formed from 1890s to the present day.

Un-safe waters? Or how a balloon when inflated in the deep can become overblown up to burst in the surface.

By Ricardo Goulão Santos

We recently celebrated the World Water Day, also noted by IDS, namely in the insightful blog post by Lyla Mehta, of the Knowledge, Society and Technology research team (KNOTS). The blog post as well as the event organized by IDS and APPG for International Development, opportunely named “Universal access to water and sanitation: more than a pipedream?”, raised questions on whether having achieved the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on access to water really meant reaching the important milestone we aspired to.

In the backdrop comes the March 6th 2012 press statement that MDG drinking water target was reached. The main question posed there was: how universal (emphasis added) was the provision of safe water? However, some of my fieldwork travels in Timor-Leste have brought me to question how safe is the water we are lead to believe so many people have now access to, thanks to the effort sustained under the MDGs.


Rural Water Provision – plumbing in Suco Fatumasi,

Bazartete Sub-District, Liquiça District, Timor-Leste



But what was indeed the MDG drinking water target (MDG 7, target 7c) ? As it is stated, the goal was to “[h]alve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking-water and basic sanitation”. Committed to this objective in Timor-Leste, following the Aid Transparency Portal are international agencies such as the Asian Development Bank and bilateral aid agencies from countries such as Japan, the US, Korea, New Zealand, Australia and regions such as the European Union. As a symbol of this commitment, the Australian Aid Agency, AUSAID, announced in October 2012 to have brought clean water to the Timorese district of Covalima. One cannot fail to notice a first nuance in the statement: it is not “safe water”, it is “clean water” that was brought to the district. But, nonetheless, “[a]s a result of the system, over 2,000 people in [the village of] Matai [district of Covalima] have access to water just metres from their homes.” But was that really the commitment stated in the MDGs?

Following WHO guidelines, “[s]afe drinking-water, as defined by the Guidelines, does not represent any significant risk to health over a lifetime of consumption, including different sensitivities that may occur between life stages.” The importance of have safe drinking water can be seen in the depth of regulation put in place by law in countries such as Canada, the US, Australia and regions such as the European Union, and recommendations in countries such as South Africa or Brazil just to give some examples. Again, as an example it seems fitting to quote the Australian Safe Drinking Water Act:

                                  “For the purposes of this Act, drinking water is unsafe if the water:

                                 (a) causes, or is likely to cause, harm to a person who consumes the water; or
                                 (b) is the means by which an illness has been, or is likely to be, transmitted; or
                                 (c) contains any pathogen, substance, chemical or blue-green algal toxin, whether
                                      alone or in combination, at levels that may pose a risk to human health (subject
                                      to any tolerance, condition or circumstance determined or agreed by the Minister
                                      or the Chief Executive for the purposes of this provision); or
                                  (d) is not otherwise, or may not otherwise be, reasonably fit for human consumption.”

While on fieldwork, in the sites I conducted some of my interviews, I got the chance to see some of the water provision infrastructure built under some of these programmes.

Rural Water Provision – plumbing in Suco Fatumasi,

Bazartete Sub-District,  Liquiça District, Timor-Leste

The picture to the right depicts a pipe that brings “clean water” (Bé Mós, as it says in Tétum) to the small village/suco of Fatumasi, in the sub-district of Bazartete. The pipes are on open air or dug in the pathways almost at the surface, in constant contact with the elements. This particular one, in the photo,  held by sticks dug in the earth is a clearly fragile “construction”. The joints are isolated with rubber tyres, that, though flexible cannot, in any way, assure that no water contamination will come to happen, foremost from the industrial rubber itself.

In the island of Ataúro, I saw one pipe being held on the top of a few stones, piled to keep the angle of it so that the water would flow properly. That pile of relatively rounded stones, polished by a river that passed just below had no hint of cement gluing them, making it fairly easy for a passing wild animal to accidently throw it down and eventually break the pipe. Some of the pipes in Ataúro have indeed bridged the distances to faraway villages, having been placed in the cliffs just by the shore, not high enough to prevent stormy seas to hit them with the waves nor protected from an eventual landslide to break them. However, their placement makes a maintenance or replacement effort a daring one.



Rural Water Provision – water  facility in Suco Parlamento,
Lautem Sub-District, Lautem District, Timor-Leste

In the village of Moro, suco Parlamento, Lautem district, I got to see a water collection facility. This was one of the many natural pools the village has. This particular one was, as the next picture shows, protected with fences so as to avoid any farm animal in the neighborhood (goats, pigs or cows walk freely in the village) to contaminate the water. The facilities do show the provision of a space where some water treatment may occur. However, this, I was told was only done for the pipes serving the bigger village of Lautém. The local community used water piped from the two other pools.

Those were inviting swimming pools and other than the slight sulphurous smell, their freshness made the delight of children and of those that washed their clothes there. The picture below shows a villager getting some water from one of such, unprotected, pools. A pipe is visible, coming from the smaller pool where the villager collects his water. This pipe, I was told, is one of those that takes water to that village and others nearby.



Rural Water Provision – another pool in Suco Parlamento,
Lautem Sub-District, Lautem District, Timor-Leste


One cannot, in all fairness avoid to be concerned about how safe this water is. Yet, infrastructures like these make Timor-Leste to be a country where 91% of the urban population and 60% of the rural population was said to have access to “improved water” in 2010.

And here the waters become turbid. The fact is, the celebrated achievement of the water MDG target does not state that the number of people without access to safe drinking water will reduce but the number of people without access to “improved water”. And what is this? This is the accomplished downgrading of an ambitious goal. Following the definition provided by the WHO / UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply and Sanitation, in charge of measuring the countries’ achievements regarding this MDG goal, “An improved drinking-water source is defined as one that, by nature of its construction or through active intervention, is protected from outside contamination, in particular from contamination with faecal matter.” It includes water sources such as piped water into dwelling, piped water to yard/plot, public tap or standpipe, tube well or borehole, protected dug well, protected spring, or rainwater.


However, as put by the participants in the IDS-APPG venue, one cannot be sure the water from a well does not get contaminated. In fact, with some of the infrastructures I could see, one cannot be certain even piped water into dwellings is free of contamination. Let’s be clear on one thing. Having water closer to where people live is a good thing. Having it piped into school facilities, as the AUSAID BESIK programme has done, in some cases, is something to cheer. However, no one can claim this water is safe! And the fact is, Timorese people still have the general practice of boiling the water before drinking it (unfortunately not before using it to wash vegetables and other food).

If someone gets some diving lessons, she or he may learn that if you fill a balloon with air near the depths, as it goes to the surface it tends to become overblown and eventually may burst. The “success” of the water MDG may be one of this cases. In the depth of the challenges to reduce illness and foster livelihoods by increasing the access to water, some improvements were made. Those were, in many cases, quite simple, like the building of wells or introducing pumps. Others, as in some places of Timor, entailed the plumbing of water through kilometres of pipes. Yet, as the news of these improvements reached the surface, they were clearly overblown. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, the news of this success were clearly exaggerated, at least in Timor-Leste. What is troublesome here is that this is not only an issue of maintenance, as correctly mentioned in the IDS-APPG venue. It is also an issue of ill construction and the lack of provision of proper construction supervision.

In the future, one is to expect the results of the access to water to be assessed. It is likely that, by then, the lack of maintenance will make these, already fragile infrastructures to meet early failures and prompt further investments and, maybe, further aid. It is troublesome to think that those that badly constructed the current systems may still get to profit from their replacement. Meanwhile, if I could, I would like to suggest a small reflection. If access to water is a human right, if we, in the “global North”, do not feel safe about water consumption without the heavy failsafe regulations we impose, how can we accept such weak systems to be propelled as an MDG success? These are but few examples in one country. The only hope is that these are not examples of what is found around the developing world. Otherwise, this “success” may make us sail through seriously unsafe waters as countries are measured against clearly downgraded targets. As Lyla said, “[t]he MDG definition of ‘improved’ sources does nothing to address issues concerning water quality and issues concerning operation and maintenance of the service,” and this allowed for clearly less that fitting water provision systems put in place. In the end, one cannot but hold strong reservations on how effectively these systems will prevent illness and foster livelihoods.



‘Middle Cities’ – Are we forgetting to nurture the engines of our future growth?

By Jaideep Gupte

With the world now mostly urban, nearly 60% of our global GDP is generated in only 600 urban centres. Moreover, large urban centres are quite simply the places where growth has been occurring – this is a function of concentrated economic activity. But this story is really about what is yet to come. For the first time, a country like India, with only a third of its population currently urbanised, which is far less than Brazil (86%) or China (47%), is reporting higher population growth in urbanised areas than across its vast rural landscape. In sub-Saharan Africa, the urban population is projected to double by 2030. This growth can be categorised into two significant trends: just under 30% is projected to occur due to what is classically understood as rural-urban migration. Significantly, the rest will occur due to natural increases in urban population, that is, cities and towns generating their own population growth. National planning bodies also have a say in this when they classify peri-urban or peripheral areas as under municipal administration.

This ‘urban-shift’ is going to require resources at a monumental scale – China for example, predicts it will need $8.1 trillion in new investment by 2020 to accommodate its new urban dwellers. Current rates of investments into infrastructure are falling far behind these levels. And not just in terms of scale, but importantly, also in terms of location: focussing on new or projected population growth, the mega-cities of the developing world are quickly being overtaken by a vast number of small and medium sized urban areas, each numbering approximately 100,000 in population.

These ‘middle’ cities and towns across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia are going to be the main hosts of urban growth. Understandably, these town and cities are also the weakest in terms of human capacity, infrastructure or service provision, and have a very thin local tax-base to use for future investment. Local revenue of most of these municipalities is often less than 1% of their country’s GDP. This has created a critical mismatch across a range of sectors, from basic service provision, law and order, to disaster preparedness, which directly impacts our progress on poverty eradication.

This is the theme of this year’s Global Monitoring Report - Rural Urban Dynamics and the MDGs, which provides an in-depth analysis on urbanisation as a force for poverty reduction and progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. I speak with Jos Verbeek, Lead Economist at the World Bank and Manager of the Global Monitoring Report, on what impact urban development has on rural poverty, what roles and responsibilities the private sector has in fostering equitable urban growth, and how ‘middle’ cities can be supported in becoming engines of our future growth.

Middle cities’ – are we forgetting to nurture the engines of our future growth? by Ids (Uk) on Mixcloud

When an economist goes to the field – and yes it does happen!

By Alia Aghajanian
This post is mainly in response to the reactions of surprise and suspicion when talking to colleagues about my fieldwork. Yes, I am an economist, and yes, I have gone to the field!

Most PhD students at IDS spend the better half of the second year of their PhD programme conducting primary research with real research participants. This research can take the form of life history interviews, short focus group discussions, participant observation, ethnographic research and so on. So how does a research project that relies on numbers, rather than people, involve fieldwork[1]? Hopefully, this post will shed some light on what happens when an economist goes to the field, by describing the field data collection conducted for my PhD thesis.

Two months ago I conducted a household survey amongst residents of a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon (Nahr el Bared) who had been displaced to various locations throughout the North of Lebanon and beyond, due to a conflict that destroyed the camp in 2007. The idea behind the research is to evaluate the consequences of returning home after conflict-induced displacement – in terms of social and economic reintegration. While some qualitative research has shown that formerly displaced persons often face difficulties upon returning home[2], the quantitative literature is yet to address this question in a rigorous manner.

Once I had finessed my research questions, I set to work designing my household survey. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and after the conflict and the initiation of the reconstruction of the camp, UNRWA created a database of displaced refugees (including their addresses) which is updated on a quarterly basis. Using this database I was able to create my sample, and I aimed for 600 households – around 10% of the population. In order to guarantee that the sample collected was representative of the geographical distribution of the population under study, I set the sample size in each geographical area equal to 10% of its actual population size.

After designing the sample I started work on the questionnaire. Many months were spent developing this, as I drew from various different standardised questionnaires and then adapted the questions to suit my context. Particularly, I was interested in measuring social capital, and after an extensive literature review I developed a relatively large range of questions that aimed to capture different elements of social capital, from trust to social interactions. Unfortunately, a household survey does not allow the luxury of changing the questionnaire once data collection starts, so many run-throughs with friends, supervisors, and finally members of the data collection team ensured that it was as perfect as possible (inevitably, in hindsight there are many questions I wish I had also included!).

Planning the logistics of the actual data collection came next. As much as I would have liked to interview 600 households myself, time would not allow it[3]. So I needed to hire a team that I could trust, and more importantly that the research participants could trust. In an ideal world, data collectors would be complete strangers to the respondents, to ensure confidentiality and unbiased responses. On the other hand, the refugee camps that we were conducting research in were not safe environments, and can often turn hostile. I did not think it a good idea to bring in a team of strangers to the field sites and draw unnecessary attention to ourselves. For this reason, data collectors were local residents of the camps in the sample, but were assigned to sectors in the camp as far as possible from the sector that they lived in.

Prior to fieldwork starting we set up meetings with relevant persons in the field site communities (this included the camp services officers, leaders of political parties, and members of the camps’ popular committees) to obtain the necessary permissions and explain the aim of the household survey. I was questioned on the importance of my research, what new information my research could provide, and what policy implications my research could have, as there has already been quite a lot of research conducted on the residents of Nahr el-Bared[4]. A few days prior to fieldwork, these meetings were a reminder of the commitment I was making to the research participants. While no direct policy changes would necessarily result from my research (a point made clear to consenting participants), I made a commitment to understand how these households had been affected by the conflict, subsequent displacement, and return. As well as to do my best to communicate these findings not only to the academic world, I will try to disseminate my findings to policy makers who are concerned (or should be concerned) with the reintegration process of refugees and displaced persons around the world.

With the necessary permissions granted, we arrived to the field with a specific target of households to be interviewed for each field site. But we still needed to ensure that households were selected randomly within these areas. In areas where displaced households were clustered together, data collectors used what is known as the “right-hand-rule”. This means that after the first interview was completed, the data collector crossed eight[5] consecutive households on his/her right-hand path and interviewed the eighth household. Whenever data collectors reached an intersection, they took the lane on their right hand side and completed the route by turning to their right until they reached the main route again. In this way all areas of the camp were covered, and we ensured that all households had an equal probability of being selected. However, in areas where households were spread apart, households were tracked using addresses, phone numbers, and the key-contacts of the field supervisors[6].

As it was important that these protocols were followed correctly and consistently, and that data collectors were not interviewing the first household they could find (or worse, sitting under a tree and completing the required number of questionnaires), the field supervisors, coordinators and I conducted random checks on the data collectors and asked them to retrace their path with us.

Data collectors interviewed households using tablet PCs programmed with a structured questionnaire (which in turn required many weeks of testing!). This meant that at the end of each day I was able to extract all the data collected and convert it to an excel file. To the annoyance of the data collectors, I was then able to check for any inconsistencies and clear this up with them the next morning. Some examples of these inconsistencies are the sex of an individual not reflecting his/her name, or a 50 year old woman being the mother to a 45 year old man. If I was not able to clear these issues up with the data collectors, they went back to the household for further clarification.

In addition to making data validation easier, there was an all round consensus among the team that the tablet PCs were a great bonus to the data collection. Many questions in the questionnaire were related to the responses of previous questions, but luckily there was no need for data collectors to navigate through these difficult and complex skip codes, as the programme[7] used automatically calculated these. Inevitable errors that occur during data entry were minimised, as responses were only entered once. In addition, I was able to observe the data in real time, which was quite satisfactory after a long hard day of data collection. Also, rather than finding the tablet PCs intimidating, respondents were initially only interested in the tablets, and at this point data collectors found it much easier introducing themselves and the research project once their attention had been caught. Even during training, data collectors were eager to learn about this new and exciting technology, practicing the questionnaire amongst themselves and then later at home with their families.

After two weeks of intense data collection, we were done! I now have a dataset of 590[8] households ready to analyse. This dataset will allow me to describe certain demographic characteristics of the sample, being representative of the larger population. For example, I will be able to estimate the employment rates and education levels of the population under study, as well as observe community levels of social capital, cohesion, and integration. Collecting a representative and unbiased sample allows me to make scientific conclusions, such as whether the average literacy rate is statistically different for females and males. More importantly, I hope to estimate causal relationships and their statistical significance: For example, what is the effect of returning compared to prolonged displacement on levels of trust in neighbours, and is this effect significant?

While my sample is relatively large, it can be argued that I will not have as much depth to my research that qualitative research allows. Although a properly collected large dataset increases the representativeness and the unbiased position of the participants in the research, more focused research can provide insight and information which is not necessarily limited to a structured questionnaire. While I acknowledge this trade-off between depth and breadth, I still believe there is room for these two methods to complement each other, rather than to conveniently ignore and debase the other. In fact, much of the qualitative research on return migration and return after displacement has guided the hypotheses that I will empirically test with the data collected.

Unfortunately not many economists get to collect their own primary data. Organizing a household survey can be expensive and time-consuming. Researchers need to think twice before conducting a large survey. Is it worth the required resources? Is it worth the time of the respondents? And can another existing dataset answer the research questions just as effectively? Chris Blattman writes an interesting blog on the questions researchers (and I think this is especially relevant for quantitative researchers) should ask themselves before going to the field. On the other hand, collecting your own data can be a very rewarding experience, attaching human faces to what can otherwise be just numbers.


[1] In fact, most applied analysis conducted by micro-economists involves secondary datasets that were initially collected from the field. This blog gives an example of the collection of these kinds of datasets.
[2] Often refugees and internally displaced persons are away for so long that “home” has become a foreign environment. See Black, Richard and Saskia Gent. 2006. "Sustainable Return in Post-Conflict Contexts." International Migration, 44(3), 15-38.
[3] The role that I played during the fieldwork was that of a field supervisor, assigning tasks for each member of the team at the beginning of the day and checking up on the data collection process and resulting data throughout the day - and unfortunately long into the night.
[4] Having said that, during one meeting the relevant person seemed to be more interested in an upcoming Premier League football match than the relevance of my household survey.
[5] This number was calculated by dividing the number of households in the sample by the total population, and allowing a margin for refusals and unavailable households. Data collectors asked neighbours or directly knocked on the doors of dwellings to enquire as to whether households were originally from Nahr el Bared camp. This was because Nahr el Bared families are living alongside other Palestinian families and more recently alongside Syrian refugees, and we did not want the number of non-Nahr el Bared households to inflate the count number. If households were not from Nahr el-Bared then the household was not included in the count.
[6] Before heading to the field the supervisors met with various key informants, such as the Palestinian popular committee for relevant camps, the relevant camp services officer, local NGOs who had provided aid to displaced persons, the national Palestinian scouts group, notable media persons, and notables of Palestinian political parties.
[7] I used ODK, an open source programme developed by researchers at the University of Washington.
[8] This is slightly lower than the target as there was a difficulty in tracing certain households. While this is a very small “attrition rate”, I will still try to include robustness checks later on in my analysis to correct for this.

Social transfers: all good for children?

by Keetie Roelen

The positive impact of social protection programmes is now widely acknowledged. They help to increase household income, smooth consumption and protect against shocks. With respect to children, social protection has been found to increase school enrolment and attendance rates, improve nutritional outcomes and reduce child labour. Given these positive impacts, interest in the role of social protection is now also widening to other aspects of children’s lives. Momentum is growing around questions of the potential impact of social protection programmes on child protection outcomes. Last week, UNICEF IRC Office of Research published a paper on the link between social transfers and child protection, a draft version of which was presented and discussed during an expert meeting in Florence last month.

A notable observation from the paper and discussions at the expert meeting refers to the lack of knowledge about the linkages between social transfers and child protection outcomes. Whilst we know quite a lot about the effect of transfers on children’s education and health, few evaluations have considered the effect of programmes on issues of child protection, which would include early marriage, family separation, violence, abuse and neglect. This thin evidence base is not limited to social transfers only; in general we know little about the linkages between social protection and child protection.

The lack of knowledge can be attributed to a number of factors. Firstly, issues of child protection are largely outside of the ‘theory of change’ of social protection programmes. Whilst many programmes include the increase in school enrolment rates and immunization coverage in their objectives, few spell out the reduction of early marriage and prevention of loss of parental care, for example, as explicit goals. Secondly, the effect of social protection on child protection is much harder to observe and study. Child protection violations are much less visible to outsiders, easier to hide and sensitive to investigate. Finally, the linkages between social protection and child protection outcomes are everything but straightforward. Whilst improved nutritional outcomes or school attendance will be highly correlated with an increase in household income through social transfers, the link between household wealth and child protection is much more tenuous.

As such, evidence on the link between social protection and child protection remains thin on the ground. However, the modest information that is available suggests that social protection programmes can far-reaching impacts in terms of child protection – both positive and negative, and that there is a dire need for more investigation in this area.

On the positive side, social protection has the potential reduce child protection violations, largely through its reduction of poverty. Improved household income can prevent the loss of parental care and family separation by avoiding parents having to migrate or leaving their children in the care of others. Poverty reduction is also likely to reduce stress levels in the household, thereby improving the quality of care for children. The provision of transfers can also work as a positive incentive for foster or kinship carers, particularly in areas with many orphans.

That said, the provision of social protection can also have negative impacts in terms of child protection, mostly through perverse incentives or due to unintended side effects of programme implementation. For example The incentivisation of foster care through social transfers can result in low-quality care and ‘commodification’ of children when unaccompanied by careful screening and training of carers. Unintended side effects can result from trying to comply with conditions in CCTs (such as overfeeding or keeping a child underweight when having to meet certain weight requirements) or the requirement to work in public works programmes (including the lack of child care or children having to substitute for domestic or farm work).

There is no doubt that social protection holds great potential for improving children’s lives. However, more information is needed about programmes’ impact on outcomes outside of the more easily observable ones, such as education, health and nutrition. It has been argued before that child-sensitive social protection needs a nuanced perspective, rather than be based on assumptions about we think works and does not work for children (Roelen and Sabates-Wheeler 2012), and this also holds with respect to the link between social transfers and child protection outcomes. An important step in gaining better insights into this link is not merely to do more research, but to do research that goes beyond the parameters as set by social transfer programmes’ ‘theories of change’. This requires an acknowledgement that child protection outcomes are not only shaped by the interventions directly (i.e. the provision of cash or the condition of school attendance or regular health check-ups) but also, or maybe primarily, by the design and implementation features of those interventions. As long as the potential impact, foreseen and unforeseen, of these features is not adequately considered, the picture about the link between social transfer programmes and child protection will remain incomplete and partial, and programmes may cause as much harm to children as they do good.

References:
Barrientos, A., Byrne, J., Villa, J.M. and Pena, P. (2013) Social Transfers and Child Protection. Office of Research  Working Paper WP-2013-05. Florence: UNICEF IRC Office of Research.

Roelen, K. and Sabates-Wheeler, R. (2012) A child sensitive approach to social protection: serving practical and strategic needs. Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, 20:3, pp. 309-324.