Cash Transfers and Gender Differentials in Child Schooling and Labor: Evidence from the Lesotho Child Grants Programme

FAMILY AND CHILD allowances constitute about 16 percent of total spending on cash transfers (CTs) worldwide (Honorati, Gentilini, and Yemtsov 2015). These programs often focus on increasing investments in children’s human capital, particularly in nutrition and schooling, with the goal of reducing the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Other old-age social pension programs and poverty-targeted CTs have similarly targeted human capital investment objectives. To this end, the impacts of CTs on child welfare outcomes have been widely studied (De Hoop and Rosati 2014), showing overall positive results on schooling and in some cases a reduction in child labor. The bulk of such evidence on both conditional and unconditional CTs shows that they have substantial impacts on child enrollment and attendance, particularly in secondary schooling, where attendance tends to be lower in poor households (World Bank 2014). A remaining important question about CTs, both conditional and unconditional, is whether their impacts on human capital investments are equitable between boys and girls vis-à-vis the use of their labor. The bulk of studies available on CTs show no consistency on whether impacts in education benefit girls or boys more. Gender differences in the impacts of CTs on child labor also remain inconclusive. Differences in outcomes by gender, given household access to CT programs, have important implications for gender equality in human capital accumulation and economic growth. Therefore, when designing CT programs to mitigate constraints faced by households in investing in children, public policy must also consider factors