an Eldis Resource
Conditional cash transfers: a ‘pathway to women’s empowerment’?
Do cash transfers continue poor women’s second-class citizenship status?
Authors:
M. Molyneux
Publisher:
Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC, 2008
Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) provide mothers of school-age children in extreme poverty with a cash subsidy conditional on their children's attendance at school and health clinics. This paper assesses the evidence for the claim that these programmes empower women. It finds that:
- in a fragmented system of protection, cash transfers often represent , rather than an extension of their citizenship rights
- although CCTs are designed to target the extremely poor and the particularly vulnerable, they operate under a highly selective definition of social need
- these programmes privilege and target some needs over others even at household level, reinforcing social inequalities within the family itself
- CCTs depend on the unacknowledged but significant contribution of women’s care work, as well as their informal contribution to the programme in the form of unpaid labour
- highly unequal gender relations are perversely central to the functioning of such programmes
- in general, if cash transfers are part of a broader effort to improve and strengthen the social sector while attending to the urgent needs of the most deprived, they can be welcomed as much needed stop-gap measures
- conversely, if they signal a move in the direction of residualist welfare policies designed as compensation for exclusionary economic development, then they represent a more worrying trend
- if cash transfers are to enhance the life chances of seriously disadvantaged populations, their design needs to take into account the household as a whole, so that the needs of all members are met.
