The economics of conditional cash transfers

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs provide cash transfers to households conditional on the fulfillment of co-responsibilities that are defined in terms of specified behaviors. Although these behaviors could in principle be any behaviors (for example, applying appropriate doses of fertilizers or showing up at work on time), in practice the term is currently used to refer to behaviors that are thought to increase human capital investments in nutrition, health, and education. Such co-responsibilities include, for example, regular attendance at health clinics or at school. For many of these programs, the transfers are provided to women in the households under the maintained assumption that transfers to women will result in greater human capital investments, particularly in children, than would equal transfers to men in the same households.