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What's the matter with "conditional" cash transfers?
25 October 2006
"Conditional Cash Transfers" may be flavour of the month, but the terminology at least leaves an unsavoury taste in the mouth! The use of the word "conditional" is misleading, for three reasons: it is imprecise, it is paternalistic, and it is morally questionable. Let us look at each of these issues in turn. It is imprecise because it is not at all clear what is included in the category of a "conditional" transfer. The World Bank definition is as follows:
"Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs aim at reducing poverty in the short term through cash transfers while at the same time trying to encourage investments into the human capital of the next generation by making these transfers conditional upon regular school attendance or the regular use of preventive health care services."
This appears to limit CCTs to transfers that involve access to health and education services. But a cash-for-work scheme is equally "conditional" - the transfer is conditional upon the provision of labour. And many other transfers may also be considered "conditional" - they depend upon a beneficiary turning up at a particular place at a particular time to collect a food ration, or they require a recipient to travel some distance to exchange a voucher for agricultural inputs in a particular shop. Other transfers are conditional on characteristics of the beneficiary: being HIV-positive, owning land, being over 60 years old, being orphaned, having a disability. Come to think of, aren't all social transfers conditional on something? Even a universal fertiliser subsidy is conditional on the beneficiary buying fertiliser.
Secondly, the term "conditional" smacks of Bretton Woods paternalism. It is redolent of the "conditionalities" imposed by IMF, World Bank and other donors when making loans or implementing budget support programmes, a perpetuation of the mindset that imposed "structural adjustment" and enforced "poverty reduction strategies". It fails to convey the sense of partnership or inclusion that should be the basis for social protection.
And, thirdly, it is morally highly questionable whether a Government (or donors) can, on the one hand, proudly tell its citizens that social protection is their basic "human right"; and then, on the other hand, threaten to deprive the neediest among them of that very "right" if they fail to meet certain "conditions"!
So, if "conditional" is the wrong terminology for such transfers involving a reciprocal obligation on recipients to access health and education services, what is the right one? The author has two suggestions, both based on the concept of a mutually-agreed partnership between beneficiaries and grant-giving governments: either "consensual" ("requiring only the consent of the parties to make it obligatory", OED), or "compactual" (a neologism borrowed from the idea of a social "compact", meaning "a mutual bargain or agreement", Chambers). Both have the advantage of beginning with the letter "c", thus preserving the acronym "CCT"; and both clearly distinguish such transfers from labour-based transfers (perhaps "contractual" transfers?), and from other types of social transfer that do not require a reciprocal obligation on the part of the beneficiary.
So let's hear no more talk of "Conditional" Cash Transfers!
Image Credit: Trygve Bolstad/ Panos Pictures
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