A growing number of evaluations have assessed the effects of social cash transfers on the reduction of poverty, for example on tax-financed pensions in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay or on non-contributory pension schemes in Brazil, Bangladesh and South Africa. While such ex-post evaluations are indispensable for the evaluation of existing programmes, policy-makers are also interested in knowing more about the effects that can be expected from such programmes in a given context ex ante.

Micro-simulations have proved to be a useful tool in this respect, as they provide the possibility of easily testing different policy options. This tool has been widely used in high-income and transition countries, but only a few studies so far have estimated the impact of introducing basic social protection benefits in low-income countries, such as old-age pensions and conditional cash transfers for a number of African countries