I have read with interest the recent articles from Sissy Teese and the World Bank on the relative merits of conditional and unconditional cash transfers, and I want to commend your website for giving space to this lively debate between “David and Goliath”.

Having digested the World Bank’s response, in which they state that “none of us believe that CCT are necessarily superior to UCT”, I am left wondering why they should have invested so much time and effort, let alone taxpayers’ resources, to come to this conclusion and why on earth does this warrant the publication of a 383-page report solely on conditional cash transfers?

Surely, if the Bank is genuinely of the opinion that “the choice of instruments (conditional or unconditional cash transfers) is dependent on the goals being pursued and the conditions under which those policies are implemented”, it would have been more sincere of them (and more helpful for the rest of us) to have produced a document entitled “Cash Transfers: Reducing Present and Future Poverty” and to have relegated the conditionality debate to a chapter or an appendix.

I look forward to the publication of such a document which would dispel once and for all the sassy Sissy’s perception that the World Bank has a preference for conditional transfers.