• Food programmes

Food programmes

This working paper, published by the UK Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC), reviews and analyses the Kalomo Pilot Social Cash Transfer Scheme in Zambia. The scheme targeted households suffering critical levels of food poverty and with high dependency ratios (a high number of children or elderly members for each working-age adult in the household). Beneficiaries and the local community found that transfers had improved the well-being of the poorest households. Some beneficiaries were using the transfers to buy food and other basic needs, while others had saved some cash (including through a rotating fund) and were investing in seeds and small animals.

Outlining future plans to expand the scheme as part of a child welfare project, the paper notes that the majority of people living in the 10 per cent of poorest households are children, and most of them are orphans. It contends that the most cost-effective way to improve these children’s welfare is to give more economic power to their caregivers. The paper also argues that social cash transfers are affordable: if extended to all of the 200,000 destitute households in Zambia, the annual costs would amount to 4 per cent of the annual foreign aid inflow, or 0.4 per cent of Zambian GDP.

• Full text of document
• Publisher details
• Send to a friend