WUNRN
New America Foundation Policy Paper
Opportunities for Innovation in Girl-Centered Cash Transfers
· By Jamie M. Zimmerman, Nicole Tosh, Jamie Holmes
Oc
October 11, 2012 - Over the last decade, anti-poverty initiatives across the
developing world have increasingly focused on gender-based strategies, and in
particular, on achieving equality and empowerment through gender-focused
program innovation. While important progress has been made in the last several
years, men still outnumber women in paid employment in almost every region of
the developing world, with more women working informally, and in more
vulnerable employment positions, than men.
Girls in the developing world are underrepresented
in education, too, with female university-level enrollment in Southern Asia and
sub-Saharan
There are over 580 million girls in the world aged
10 to 19 years, of which roughly 90 million are in low-income countries where
the per capita income is less than USD 1,005 per year. Over 85 percent of
adolescent girls are estimated to live in poverty in countries such as
Investing in adolescent girls is important for
addressing inequality and is critical for the realization of their rights, but
it can also pay enormous economic dividends. Mounting evidence shows that
investments in adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) may prove to be an even
more effective way of ending intergenerational poverty than programs targeting
children generally. For example, in their 2011 paper, “Measuring the Economic
Effects of Investing in Girls: The Girl Effect Dividend,” the World Bank’s Jad
Chaaban and Wendy Cunningham found that if young women in Brazil were employed
at the same levels as men, the annual national GDP would rise USD 23
billion. In lifetime income by that logic, they calculate that
Girl-targeted social protection policies, to the
extent they exist, have traditionally aimed at keeping adolescent girls in
school, prioritizing HIV prevention, delaying marriage, and offering
reproductive health programs before puberty. These are all critical objectives.
However, advancements in technology coupled with another emerging trend in
anti-poverty initiatives—the shift in social protection programs from in-kind
transfers to cash payments, and the increasing disbursement of those cash
payments using electronic methods—provide a unique opportunity to consider new
and complementary goals that could enhance both the efficiency and efficacy of
girl-centered programs.
This paper suggests that as investments in
targeted cash transfer interventions for AGYW increase, policymakers and other
stakeholders should leverage trends toward financially-inclusive e-payments as
a means to achieve multiple potential objectives including:
1.
Counting adolescent girls to ensure they have access to
health and educational opportunities by encouraging registration at birth
2.
Improving adolescent girls’ access to financial services
3.
Encouraging asset-building opportunities
We posit that doing so could result in several
positive outcomes, such as:
1.
Greater potential to provide adolescent girls with access
to formal financial systems
2.
Formal identity and rights
3.
The chance for governments and others investing in
girl-focused programs to achieve a better return on investment
4.
Reduce government leakage and corruption that waste
precious resources
5.
Provide financial institutions an expanded client base
and holdings
6.
Create opportunities for practitioners looking for ways
to nudge behavior or enhance social and economic outcomes
The trend toward girl-centered asset-building
strategies is certain to gather momentum in the coming years, especially as
evidence continues to accumulate on the multiplier effects of investing in
adolescent girls. At the same time, social protection payments will continue to
become more effective at leveraging human capital investments and more
efficient in their delivery, producing benefits for governments, financial
intermediaries, and recipients. The nexus between the two offers fertile ground
for new pilots and improvements in current programs.
To be sure, there are significant challenges ahead
for development practitioners. The relationship between asset-building
opportunities for adolescent girls, financial inclusion, and
electronic-delivery of social protection payments involves a diverse set of
stakeholders and interests. While momentum is building toward leveraging
e-payments for savings opportunities, policymakers continue to struggle with
program-design issues that are often context-specific.
In short, the shift to electronic payments
provides a prime opportunity to experiment with new asset-building strategies
aimed at adolescent girls—whether that means piloting in-school banking with
the delivery of cash transfers, harnessing the power of biometrics to count
adolescent girls and help thwart early marriage, or paying attention to the
role of habit formation in developing savings habits. Further experimentation,
topical and comparative analyses, and facilitated coordination on the regional
and national levels will help ensure these opportunities are well capitalized
upon.
Further research and experimentation, with careful
monitoring and evaluation plans, must be designed to allow shared best
practices where cross-contextual lessons can be gleaned. Very few social
protection programs have been evaluated using proper baseline measurements, let
alone a randomized design. Most program evaluations are relegated to estimating
causal effects. There is real and vast potential for further ambitious yet
smart experimentation and research. Technology has just begun to open the door
for the development of an innovation renaissance aimed at helping adolescent
girls—the most vulnerable population on the planet. The challenge is to walk
through that door aware of its true potential.
To read the full report, click here.
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