Comparative Case Studies: Review of IDB Institutional Support to the Conditional Cash Transfer in Three Lower-Middle-Income Countries

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Date
Nov 2015
This document is part of the comparative evaluations developed by the Office of Evaluation and Oversight on projects financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). This evaluation analyzes the support provided by the IDB for the implementation of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs in three lower-middle-income countries.The relevance of this evaluation is twofold. First, most of the IDB¿s loan and technical cooperation operations supporting CCT programs have funded programs in middle-income countries. As a consequence, both knowledge and documents from CCT programs supported by the IDB generally refer to countries whose education and health systems are more developed. This evaluation is intended to provide more evidence on the implementation of CCT programs in lower-middle-income countries. Second, the successful implementation of CCT programs requires a high degree of institutional capacity and alignment among different critical actors. Scholars have recently questioned the relevance of CCT programs in low-income countries, given the complexity of their institutional design and, in some cases, the countries¿ poor basic service provision. This evaluation examines these concerns for the selected programs.