Strengthening the nutritional impacts of social transfers

This brief deals with some of the main issues concerning social transfers in reducing malnutrition. Based on Save the Children projects experiences, the author put the emphasis on 4 aspects needed to ensure maximum impact on nutrition:

• Adapting the design of the transfer itself: Social transfers typically comprise food or cash, or a combination of both, and whilst there is evidence that food/cash transfers can lead to improved diets, there may be a need in some settings to design the transfer to help ensure that this happens.
• Providing specific additional nutrition interventions using social transfer delivery mechanisms. Indeed, when families cannot find the products to meet the micronutrient requirements of children or pregnant women, it may be appropriate to deliver these products together with a social transfer.
• Creating links to other services that are needed to support health/nutrition of children and women. Experiences show that health/nutrition services do need to be available to families in addition to social transfers to protect children from malnutrition.
• Supporting health/nutrition social services as part of the social transfer programme. It is possible for social transfers to support improvements in the availability of essential health/nutrition services, which will in turn maximise impact on malnutrition. For example, social transfers can support directly health workers or volunteers.

Save the Children UK - March 2009