Evidence helps improve Tanzania’s community-run conditional cash transfers
Context
The community-driven development approach, which gives community groups or local governments control over planning resources and investment decisions, improves service delivery in some contexts. In Tanzania’s pilot of a community-run conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme, community committees selected beneficiaries, disbursed funds, monitored compliance and ran the programme, following some basic guidelines provided by a social fund agency.
The pilot, which started in three districts in 2010, was seen as a potential flagship approach in Tanzania and for other social protection and CCT programmes in Africa. The Tanzanian government decided to expand the programme to a national scale. To provide evidence for the scale-up, 3ie, amongst other donors, funded an impact evaluation of the pilot community-run CCT. The evaluation was led by IFPRI and included researchers from the World Bank.
The Tanzanian government wanted to design the national programme to improve outcomes for vulnerable children and the elderly. The former and current executive directors of the implementing agency, Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF), and the head of its management unit were key evaluation champions. The IFPRI research team and World Bank staff worked closely with TASAF, which wanted findings from the rigorous impact evaluation to convince the Ministry of Finance and the donors to commit resources for the next phase of the programme. The research team also reported that a number of countries with limited institutional capacity were interested in adapting Tanzania’s CCT model to delegate more duties to communities.
The randomised, mixed-methods evaluation assessed the impacts of the pilot CCT programme on community dynamics, household outcomes and programme processes in the pilot phase. Evaluated outcomes included health-seeking behaviour, the health and education of household members, asset ownership, savings, credit, consumption, and community relations.
Evidence
The evaluation found that the community-driven model led to better health. The poorest families experienced the biggest health boost, in terms of a reduction in the number of days they were sick every month. The programme had a positive effect on education, particularly for girls and the community's most vulnerable children. It also helped children, especially girls, transition to secondary school. However, qualitative analysis showed that households were often unhappy, because only some of their children benefitted from the programme.
There were minimal health effects on the elderly. Participants used cash transfers to invest in health insurance, livestock and shoes, but the programme had little impact on overall consumption, bank savings or credit decisions.
The community-run CCTs had positive effects on communal cohesion. Participants had greater trust in their leaders and in each other. One key finding is that community groups can, with adequate training and support, handle the logistics of the cash transfers and, in doing so, help improve the lives of their poorest neighbours.
Evidence impacts
Type of impact: Change policies or programmes
Decision makers use findings from an evaluation or systematic review to adjust their programming to fix targeting, cash transfer amounts, training modules or other factors that inhibit the policy or programme’s ability to achieve its intended impacts.
This is one of 3ie’s seven types of evidence use. Impact types are based on what we find in the monitoring data for an evaluation or review. Due to the nature of evidence-informed decision-making and action, 3ie looks for verifiable contributions that our evidence makes, not attribution.
Read our complete evidence impact typology and verification approach here.
Close windowThe evaluation informed the eventual scale-up of the pilot intervention into Tanzania’s Productive Social Safety Net Programme. In scaling up, TASAF changed targeting, transfer conditionalities and monitoring of compliance. The revised and expanded programme now targets households instead of individuals and focuses more on children, since the evaluation found minimal health impact on the elderly.
Given the evidence about benefits in transitions to secondary school, TASAF extended support to children in junior and senior secondary schools. It also raised the frequency of monitoring of educational conditionalities from once in 60 days in the pilot to monthly, since the evaluation found that monitoring frequency had an impact on reducing student absenteeism. The fund also changed the health conditionality of visiting a health clinic from six times a year to twice a year, since the evaluation found that attendance at clinics was already more than what the programme required.
Type of impact: Improve the culture of evidence use
When decision makers or implementers demonstrate positive attitudinal changes towards evidence use or towards information the research team provides. Examples include strengthening monitoring and evaluation systems, increasing understanding of evidence and openness to using it, integrating these systems more firmly into programming or commissioning another evaluation or review.
This is one of 3ie’s seven types of evidence use. Impact types are based on what we find in the monitoring data for an evaluation or review. Due to the nature of evidence-informed decision-making and action, 3ie looks for verifiable contributions that our evidence makes, not attribution.
Read our complete evidence impact typology and verification approach here.
Close windowSince its close participation in the evaluation of the pilot phase, TASAF is a much more sophisticated commissioner and consumer of evaluation evidence. It has embedded a large-scale, external randomised evaluation in the scale-up phase, using the pilot phase evaluation’s survey tools.
Suggested citation
International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), 2019. Improving Tanzania’s community-managed conditional cash transfers with evidence (online summary), Evidence Impact Summaries. New Delhi:3ie.
Evidence impact summaries aim to demonstrate and encourage the use of evidence to inform programming and policymaking. These reflect the information available to 3ie at the time of posting. Since several factors influence policymaking, the summaries highlight contributions of evidence rather than endorsing a policy or decision or claiming that it can be attributed solely to evidence. If you have any suggestions or updates to improve this summary, please write to influence@3ieimpact.org
Last updated on 24th October 2019