Working Paper
Are there different spillover effects from cash transfers to men and women?

This paper looks at the spillover effects of grants under the Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP) on human capital investments in conflict-affected Northern Uganda. The YOP grant was primarily aimed at providing start-up money to groups of underemployed young people, and in practice worked similarly to an unconditional cash transfer.

It kept a gender balance by mandating that groups should be at least one third female. Overall, the intervention had a significant impact on education-related expenditures, increasing them by 11–15 per cent (US$17–23) in the shorter and longer term (i.e. after two and four years). However, the educational expenditures of women did not increase.

Female recipients seem not to have spent more on education, at least in part because of redistributive pressures such as probable financial requests from other members of their YOP group. These findings are relevant for future designs of group eligibility rules and for targeting of cash transfers.