Smarter through Social Protection? Evaluating the Impact of Ethiopia's Safety-Net on Child Cognitive Abilities

In this working paper, the authors provide new estimates of the impact of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia on child cognitive achievement in the medium term. The programme is the second larget in Africa, and has been rolled out to almost 10 million beneficaries since 2005. The authors exploit four rounds of the Young Lives panel data spanning 2002-2013 and find a small but significant effect of the programme on cognitive achievement as measured by numeracy skills. They examine heterogeneity of impacts via "graduation" from the scheme, and find a positive effect on children in households that graduated just before 2013, but none for children in households that remain in the programme. 

To access the paper, please visit: http://legacy.iza.org/en/webcontent/publications/papers/viewAbstract?dp_id=10972