Poverty, cash transfers and adolescents’ lives: exploring the unintended consequences of Nepal’s social pension
Objectives
The study aimed to estimate the effects of Nepal’s Old Age Allowance, an unconditional social pension, on adolescents’ schooling, work and marriage timing in multigenerational households. It also sought to understand how additional household income is incorporated into decision-making about adolescents’ life-course options and to develop a mixed-methods framework for analysing these pathways.
Findings
The Old Age Allowance increased household spending on education and improved adolescents’ access to school, including public, private and religious schools, but in some cases families took loans in anticipation of the transfer and struggled to sustain private-school costs when payments were delayed. The pension reduced paid work for some out-of-school adolescents, yet in other households it was used to accelerate transitions to adulthood by financing boys’ economic migration and expediting the formalisation of marriage for older girls. Effects varied by household socioeconomic status, religion, gendered decision-making and the gender of the pension recipient, with households containing an elder woman showing no increase in early marriage, suggesting that transfers tend to reinforce existing preferences and constraints rather than uniformly promoting delayed marriage.
Recommendations
Designers of social pensions and other unconditional cash transfers should not assume automatic protective effects for adolescents but should explicitly consider potential impacts on schooling, work and marriage, especially in dowry-practising settings. Cash transfer policies should be integrated with complementary measures that reduce the costs of post-primary education, regulate harmful marriage practices and strengthen adolescent-focused services, and should include routine monitoring for unintended consequences on early marriage. Future research and programme evaluations should continue to use mixed methods to trace decision-making pathways and heterogeneity of effects across gender, household types and social norms to inform more adolescent-sensitive social protection design.
Share your research
You can share details of your ongoing and upcoming research to be included in the CRANKs online research tracker. By doing this, you are contributing to a coordinated, harmonised global research agenda.