Cash transfer programs have achieved wide-ranging success in reducing poverty and inequality in middle-income and developing countries.  In addition, many cash transfer program implementations have been accompanied by rigorous evaluations, providing insights into the variety of ways in which households benefit, who in the household gains, and features of cash transfer programs (e.g., conditions on their receipt) that influence impacts.  The empirical literature has largely overlooked, however, how program rules, administrative capacity and implementation have moderated impacts or limited cash transfer programs in reaching their full potential to improve the lives of the poor.  Qualitative research has identified administrative burdens and other barriers to cash transfer receipt, such as application and documentation requirements, lack of understanding or awareness of eligibility criteria, travel costs, wait times and more, and yet there has been little in the way of quantification of their costs and their implications for program impacts.

This paper examines access to cash transfer program benefits among households with children eligible for the South African Child Support Grant (CSG) program, an unconditional, means-tested cash transfer program that began in 1998.  Over time, the South African Department of Social Development extended the age of eligibility for the grant and changed application requirements to reduce transaction burdens and barriers to grant receipt, although implementation, access and take-up still varied geographically.  We use rich data drawn from surveys designed to measure the impact of the CSG that were fielded in five South African provinces between October 2010 and March 2011.  The survey data, combined with administrative data, allow us to develop detailed measures of grant receipt, including interruptions and disconnections due to changing program rules and implementation challenges.  Our study focuses on children who were adolescents at the time of the surveys, which allows us to construct measures of benefit “dosage”—both intended and realized—over the course of their childhood and to assess the implications of cash transfer interruptions and disconnections (or “dosage loss”) for outcomes that are particularly critical in adolescence, namely, youth engagement in risky behaviors.  We use nearest neighbor and generalized propensity score matching to implement several different empirical strategies for assessing how the timing of cash transfer receipt and interruptions or disconnections affect outcomes, including adolescent sexual activity, drug and alcohol use and criminal activity.

We find that approximately 60 percent of the children in our sample experienced an interruption or disconnection in receipt of the CSG and that the average dosage loss was about 20 months.  Furthermore, 90 percent of the interruptions or disconnections were problematic, that is, reflecting errors or limitations in program administration.  We find that both timing and dosage loss have significant implications for youth outcomes, including for youth engagement in some of the most risky behaviors.  These findings are particularly important given that such behaviors pose proportionately greater risk to adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa, including potential life-long negative repercussions from HIV infection.