CASH TRANSFERS, FOOD CONSUMPTION, AND NUTRITION 133
ciaries (men over age sixty-five and women over age sixty) received roughly twice the median per capita income in rural areas (Duflo 2003, 3). Duflo found an improvement in under-five child nutritional status, especially for girls, when the pension recipient was a woman (Duflo 2000, 398). On average, pension income contributed to an increase of 0.68 standard deviations in height for age for girls. Pensions received by women were associated with increased height for age (1.16 standard deviations) and weight for height (1.19 standard deviations) for girls but had a smaller and statistically insig- nificant effect for boys, whose height for age increased by 0.28 standard deviations (Duflo 2003, 14–16). This was a large effect for girls, considering that the average eligible child had a HAZ of –1.4. Converted into centimeters, these anthropometric improvements represent a 2.23-centimeter increase in girls’ height and a 0.88-centimeter increase in boys’ height over a two-year period when the pensioner was a woman. Pensions received by men were not associated with improved nutritional status for either girls or boys (Duflo 2000, 398; Duflo 2003, 3). According to Duflo, the differential effect of pen- sion income on child nutrition was a result of female recipients’ being younger (their eligibility begins at age sixty compared to age sixty-five for men) and living longer. Duflo hypothesized that, compared to older pension- receiving grandfathers, pension-receiving grandmothers were apt to have stronger incentives to invest in children because they would benefit from their support for a longer period of time in the future (Duflo 2003, 19–20). Case (2001) found a slightly larger impact of the South Africa OAP. Accord-
ing to her analysis, a pensioner in the household was associated with a 5- centimeter increase in child height and a 1 standard deviation increase in height for age, equivalent to 6 months’ worth of growth, for black and col- ored children from birth to age six (Case 2001, 11). In Zambia, monitoring reports for the SCTS noted a decrease of 9 percent-
age points in the proportion of underweight children (from 41 to 32 percent) (Zambia, MCDSS/GTZ 2005). Qualitative data also indicated that households benefited from improved dietary intake and therefore may have experienced improved nutritional outcomes; nevertheless, the survey figures should be interpreted very cautiously. The study reflected a small subset of beneficiary children because not all had growth monitoring cards and only a small number of children were weighed. Furthermore, the anthropometric data may have reflected weight fluctuations due to seasonal food availability and disease (Sridhar and Duffield 2006, 13). The Mchinji Cash Transfer Scheme demonstrated some impact on child underweight but no impact on mean weight (measured as WAZ). At baseline (March 2007), the percentage of underweight children in both intervention and comparison groups was roughly 35 percent. One year later, 15 percent of
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