Can Cash Transfer Programmes Promote Household Resilience? Cross-Country Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

Several new initiatives of cash transfer programmes have recently emerged in sub-Saharan Africa, and most target poor rural households dependent on subsistence agriculture. This paper synthesizes the key findings of From Protection to Production Project (PtoP) of FAO and discusses the role of cash transfer programmes risk management tool to increase resilience in sub-Saharan Africa. Results show that such programmes have important implications for household resilience. Although the impacts on risk management are less uniform, the cash transfer programmes seem to strengthen community ties (via increased giving and receiving of transfers) and allow households to save and pay off debts, and decrease the need to rely on adverse risk coping mechanisms. One important finding related to climate change, as illustrated by the Zambia case, is that households receiving cash transfers suffered much less from weather shocks, with poorest households as the biggest gains, and food security increased, although differing across countries. The paper concludes that social protection programmes could be more effective as safety nets by explicitly accounting for climate risk in their design and implementation.