Cash plus? What can we add to cash interventions to improve adolescent outcomes in Africa?

Exciting findings are showing benefits of cash transfers on a range of adolescent health, educational and economic outcomes. But the next generation of social protection research is asking what we can add to cash to maximise it’s effects. There is an ongoing debate about adding incentive schemes (with hard or soft conditions) and increasing new evidence of impacts of adding psychosocial interventions such as parenting. We will use new data from large-scale cohorts of adolescents and HIV-positive young people, and new RCT data from Southern Africa to examine these questions and generate new thinking about cash plus… what?

Written with Mark Orkin, (University of the Witwatersrand), Elona Toska (University of Cape Town), Janina Steinert (Oxford University), Franziska Meinck (Oxford University/University of NorthWest), Yulia Shenderovich (Cambridge University), Rocio Herrero Romero (Oxford University) and Lorraine Sherr (University College London)