2007): The impact of unconditional cash transfers on nutrition: the South African child support grant. IPC Working Paper No 39. Brasilia: International Poverty Centre

While conditional cash transfers targeted at women have been persuasively shown to improve human development outcomes in some developing countries, it is unclear how important the conditionalities themselves have been. Understanding conditionalities is especially important because they imply administrative costs and hurdles that stand as a barrier to the creation of cash transfer programs in lower income developing countries. This paper analyzes the nutritional impacts of South Africa’s unconditional Child Sup-port Grant (CSG) in which cash grants are made to child caregivers (mostly women) with no strings attached. Taking advantage of a slow program roll-out that created exogenous variation in the extent of CSG treatment received by beneficiaries, this pa-per utilizes continuous treatment methods to estimate the impact of these transfers on child nutrition as measured by child’s height-for-age. Large dosages of CSG treatment early in life are shown to significantly boost child height. These estimated height gains in turn suggest large adult earnings increases for treated children and a discounted rate of return on CSG payments of some 50%