• Background and Trouble Shooters Guide
• Micro-credit
• Skills training
• Leakage of benefits
• Excessive benefits
• Basic criteria for success

Leakage of benefits

Typically, heads of households redistribute support for OVC, such as food, cash, schoolbooks & uniforms, and income from micro-projects, away from OVC. This allows the household to meet urgent needs of other members, and means that the household as a whole benefits. The extent of redistribution and choice of beneficiary depends on the distribution of power within the household. For example, redistribution may be to male head of household or to senior wife and her children. This kind of redistribution, taken to the extreme, denies benefit to the OVC.

The same tendency can be seen at the community level: Communities are also subject to pressures that may lead them to redistribute benefits from OVC projects away from the beneficiaries.

To limit redistribution of support, programs can support delivery of specific services to OVC, for example by paying their school or health fees. The most effective step is usually to make assistance to families as a whole conditional on OVC school attendance.