Education Material Fairs (EMFs) are a social transfer delivery mechanism designed to motivate school attendance by orphans and vulnerable children in families that are unable to meet even the most basic necessities for school attendance due to financial constraints. EMFs provide a cash transfer in the form of a voucher that can be used to purchase shoes, clothes and educational materials at a fair to which vendors have been invited at a specific date and place. EMFs are thus modelled on Input Trade Fairs (ITFs) that provide farm inputs to vulnerable families in the same way.

EMFs seek (a) to provide choice for children, who are able to exercise their own preferences over what is purchased (the vouchers are physically given to named children, and parents or carers are discouraged from prescribing the choices that the children in their care make), (b) to stimulate the local economy by bringing together buyers and sellers at the fair, and (c) to pilot a potentially costeffective model that could be scaled up for improving enrolment and retention rates in schools of children from the poorest and most vulnerable families.

EMFs in Mozambique have been implemented by Save the Children UK (SC-UK) in the period 2005-06, funded by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA). A pilot fair was held in 2005, in which 934 school age OVC were given vouchers with a cash value of 130 Mtn (US$6.5). In 2006, five separate fairs were held in which a total of 3,462 school aged children were provided with vouchers with a cash value 150 Mtn (US$6.0).