• Overview of Possible Interventions
  • Elimination of School Fees
  • School Fee Waivers
  • Conditional Transfers
  • School Feeding Programs (SFPs)
  • The FRESH approach to School Health

Conditional Transfers

Conditional transfer programs generally provide money or in-kind support to poor families conditional upon certain desired behaviors. These behaviors are usually investments in human capital, such as sending children to school or ensuring that they receive regular health care.

Variants exist where support is given directly to the school, as in the cases of BEAM in Zimbabwe. If it is logistically and administratively feasible to give the transfer directly to the household, it is believed to be preferable since it more actively engages the family in ensuring the child’s school attendance. In countries with poorly developed banking systems, this option may not be feasible. If the transfer goes to the school, the school will have to meet certain conditions, such as undergoing an annual audit to ensure that transfers are being managed transparently and submitting a school development plan. If the school fails to comply with these conditions, the transfers will be withheld in the subsequent year, penalizing all of the students the transfers are designed to help. This is another advantage of transfers that target households – if one household in a community fails to fulfill the conditions linked to the transfers, only the children in that household are penalized.

Conditional transfers appear to be a cost-effective and efficient way to prevent OVC students from dropping out of school and to increase the enrollment of OVC who are currently out of school. One of the most attractive features of the conditional transfers is that the program can achieve scale by reaching large numbers of children at a relatively low cost per child. In Zimbabwe, almost 1,000,000 children benefited from conditional transfers in 2003, alone. In Mozambique, the several donor partners including the World Bank will be financing a program to provide conditional transfers to 300,000 OVC students, roughly 10% of the 2.8 million primary school aged children at a total cost per child of $20 and in Swaziland, the Government of Swaziland is financing out of its own budget a similar program to reach 52,000 OVC, roughly 25% of primary school enrollment at a total cost per child of $58. The scheme is also supported by the Global Fund for AIDS, Malaria and TB and the World Bank through its technical assistance (Project up-date and concept note).

While conditional transfers are relatively new in Africa, they have been very successful in Latin America according to recently completed impact evaluations (for more on how to approach the possibilities for a conditional transfer initiative in an African country, see this mission note from Nigeria). Whether conditional transfer programs can be as effective in Africa as they have been in Latin America will depend, in large part, upon the management capacity of the implementing ministry. (For a detailed program experience, see Workshop on Orphans and Vulnerable Children and Conditional Cash Transfers in Kenya)

Targeting poor or vulnerable beneficiaries is critical to the success of a conditional transfer program. Targeting methods will vary with the type of data available and the funding level of the program. Generally, a combination of geographic and household level targeting is used with some screening at the community level. The participation of the community and other relevant local committees (such as school committees) will ensure transparency in the selection process of beneficiaries, promote community support and improve targeting outcomes by helping to identify the neediest children. The criteria used to select children who will benefit from conditional transfers need to be adapted to the local context. How restrictive the criteria are will depend upon how many OVC are competing for transfers relative to the amount of transfer financing available. Finally, whatever the criteria used, one must ensure that the selection process does not develop adverse incentives, and does not stigmatise children and their family. Here are some examples of categorical criteria that have been used in some conditional educational programs:

An issue to bear in mind is that acquiring information about who is needy entails some costs (administrative, private, social and political costs). As a result, the costs and benefits of targeting must be assessed to decide whether, how finely and with what instrument it is appropriate to target (for a review of targeting methods and the costs and benefits attached to each, see Coady, Grosh and Hoddinott, 2002, The Targeting of Transfers in Developing Countries: Review of Experiences and Lessons).

The issue of trade-offs between the number of potential beneficiaries and the amount of the transfer is inherent given the nature of the program. The level of the grant needs to be high enough to both attract children to school and keep them enrolled, but also low enough to make the program sustainable from one year to the next.

A critical issue to assess is the financial sustainability and administrative capacity of the program. In this regard, before engaging in such a program, one may need to assess: (a) the financial feasibility and sustainability of the approach; (b) the ability for the educational system to absorb the growing number of children at primary level without hampering the quality of teaching; (c) and the ability to respond to the subsequent increased demand for secondary and tertiary education within a constrained resource context. Conditional transfers intended to increase school enrollment should thus be provided in tandem with investments in school, as most of the time, reasons attached to poor education attainment are often a consequence of both demand (parents lack the adequate resources to send their children to school) and supply constraints (the quality of teaching is deemed unsatisfactory, schools are not easily accessed).

Regardless of whether the benefit is given to the OVC’s family or to the school, a well-designed monitoring and evaluation system and a computerized database are essential to ensure that the required school attendance conditions are met (if they are not, expenditures will not be eligible for Bank financing). A detailed Project Implementation Manual, like the one used in Zimbabwe for the Enhanced Social Protection Project – Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM), will also be necessary to guide the Ministry of Education during implementation.

For more information go consult the Conditional Transfer discussion in the Health section of this toolkit and see: Social Protection on Conditional Transfers, and in particular their Conditional Cash Transfers Related Reading site. (For more detailed project experiences, see the Evaluation of Bolsa Escola in Brazil and Evaluation of the Progresa project in Mexico, Evaluating the Impact of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Lessons from Latin America.)