The conditional cash transfer revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean, beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing to this day, heralded a new prominence and acceptance of applying rigorous impact evaluations to social programmes. Over the last decade, sub-Saharan Africa has begun its own cash transfer revolution, and has followed a similar pattern of rigorous impact evaluation: in no fewer than 12 countries rigorous impact evaluations have been carried out or commissioned on government-run cash transfer programmes in the last few years. This panel includes papers from four distinct cash transfer evaluations in the region that could be considered the next generation of CT evaluations: Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Zambia. These papers introduce the new research questions currently being covered by the next generation of impact evaluations and present results for these new topics which include HIV risk (sexual debut, partner characteristics, perceptions about peer behaviour, marriage, and pregnancy), psycho-social status and mental health, comparison of cash versus health insurance in boosting health care utilization, and the contribution of cash transfers to economic growth (household level production decisions, local economy effects and attitudes towards risk). Combined, these papers provide an overview of how the unique characteristics of the sub-Saharan African context both shape the design of cash transfer programmes and present special challenges to evaluating impact. As new data emerge from these next-generation impact evaluations, there is substantial opportunity to enrich the evidence on the impacts of CTs in sub-Saharan Africa and to better understand the effectiveness of design and implementation variations in the region. Furthermore, this next generation promises to advance the types of evidence available on CTs globally and contribute to new evaluation methodologies.