Abstract

The Kenya Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (CT-OVC) is the government’s flagship social protection programme, implemented by the Children’s Department of the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Development, reaching approximately 240,000 households nationwide as of 2014. In response to a concern for the welfare of OVC, particularly AIDS orphans, the Government of Kenya, with technical and financial assistance from UNICEF, designed and began implementing a pilot program in 2004. After this successful demonstration period, the CT-OVC was formally approved by Cabinet, and integrated into the national budget.

The objective of the programme is to provide regular cash transfers to ultra-poor households living with OVC to encourage fostering and retention of children and to promote their human capital development. Eligible households receive a flat monthly transfer of 2000 Kenyan shillings (approximately USD $21), adjusted up from 1500 in 2011-2012 to account for inflation. An OVC is defined as a household resident between 0 to17 years old with at least one deceased or chronically ill parent, or whose main caregiver is chronically ill. Beneficiary households are informed that the care and protection of the resident OVC is their responsibility for receiving the cash payment, however there are no punitive sanctions for noncompliance with this responsibility (the transfer is unconditional).

Geographic coverage

Regional Coverage.

Analysis unit

Households, Individuals, Communities

Universe

Household members aged 15-25.

Kind of data

Sample survey data [ssd]

Sampling procedure

Prior to program expansion of the CT-OVC in 2007, UNICEF designed a social experiment to track the impact of the program on a range of household welfare indicators including child health and schooling and economic productivity. The evaluation was contracted to a private consulting firm, Oxford Policy Management (OPM), and entailed a cluster randomized longitudinal design, with a baseline household survey (and related community survey) conducted in mid-2007 and a 24 month follow-up in 2009. The ethical rationale for the design was that the program could not expand to all eligible locations at the same time, so locations whose entry would occur later in the expansion cycle could be used as control sites to measure impact. Thus within each of 7 districts that were scheduled to be included in this expansion phase four locations were identified as eligible, and 2 were randomized out of the initial expansion phase and served as control locations.

Targeting of households was carried out in the intervention locations according to standard program operation guidelines. Each location forms a committee of citizens that is charged with identifying potentially eligible households based on criteria of ultra-poverty and containing at least one OVC as defined above. The list of eligible households is sent to the program's central office (located within the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Development, the Ministry responsible for the program at the time), which then administers a detailed socioeconomic questionnaire to confirm eligibility, and to assess poverty in order to rank households. The final number of households that enter the program in each district depends on funding to that district but approximately 20 percent of the poorest households in each location are enrolled in the program. Since the program was not scheduled to be implemented during this phase in the control locations, program targeting was 'simulated' in order to identify a sample of households that were comparable to those identified as eligible in treatment locations. Households in either arm (Intervention, Control) were surveyed prior to their knowledge that they were selected into the program.

The 2011 survey included a Young Persons Module which covered 1235 households and 2218 individuals.

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face paper [f2f]