TY - JOUR AU - Baird, Sarah J AU - Chirwa, Ephraim AU - de Hoop, Jacobus AU - Özler, Berk TI - Girl Power: Cash Transfers and Adolescent Welfare. Evidence from a Cluster-Randomized Experiment in Malawi JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 19479 PY - 2013 Y2 - September 2013 DO - 10.3386/w19479 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19479 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19479.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Sarah J. Baird Department of Global Health Milken Institute School of Public Health George Washington University 950 New Hampshire Ave NW 4th Floor Washington, DC 20052 E-Mail: sbaird@gwu.edu Ephraim Chirwa Department of Economics Chancellor College University of Malawi PO Box 280 Zomba, Malawi Tel: (265) 01 524 222 Fax: (265) 01 525 021 E-Mail: echirwa@yahoo.com Jacobus de Hoop UNICEF Office of Research - Innocenti Piazza SS. Annunziata, 12 50122 Florence Italy E-Mail: jdehoop@unicef.org Berk Ozler 1818 H St. NW The World Bank Mail Stop MC3-306 Washington, DC 20433 United States E-Mail: bozler@worldbank.org M1 - published as Sarah Baird, Ephraim Chirwa, Jacobus de Hoop, Berk Özler. "Girl Power: Cash Transfers and Adolescent Welfare: Evidence from a Cluster-Randomized Experiment in Malawi," in Sebastian Edwards, Simon Johnson, and David N. Weil, editors, "African Successes, Volume II: Human Capital" University of Chicago Press (2016) M3 - presented at "African Development Successes Conference", July 18-20, 2010 AB - Interventions targeting adolescent girls are seen as a key component in the fight to break the cycle of poverty in developing countries. Policies that enable them to reach their full potential can have a strong impact not only on their own wellbeing, but also on that of future generations. This paper summarizes the short-term impacts of a cash transfer program on the empowerment of adolescent girls in Malawi during and immediately after the two-year intervention. We find that the program, which transferred cash directly to school-age girls as well as their parents, had effects on a broad range of important domains - including increased access to financial resources, improved schooling outcomes, decreased teen pregnancies and early marriages, better health - and generally enabled beneficiaries to improve their agency within their households. Underlying these overall impacts, the experiment revealed important differences in program effects between young women who were in school at the start of the intervention and those that were not, as well as between young women who received cash transfers conditional on regular school attendance and those who received cash unconditionally. The results point to the potential role that cash transfer programs can play in improving the lives of adolescent girls in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the heterogeneity of effects under different program designs. ER -