Summary (English)

A new ‘silver bullet’ is whizzing across the desks of policymakers and officials in development organizations: the conditional cash transfer (CCT) in education. There is a powerfully simple idea at its heart – to alleviate poverty, strategies must blend short- and long-term objectives. Specifically, cash transfers allow people who are poor to buy food and other necessities, thus improving their short-term choices; with immediate needs better met, the conditions attached to cash transfers act as incentives for poor households to support the education and health of their children. For the longer term, the resulting increase in the children’s human capital helps break the intergenerational transmission of poverty. The growing acceptance of CCT derives both from its simplicity and from study evidence that indicates it works, in some ways. This paper critically examines some of that evidence, focusing on the documentation of  educational effects.