Household targeting of social cash transfer programmes: transnational poverty alleviation and community subversion in Malawi and Lesotho

Social cash transfer schemes that provide small regular payments to poor people have become a key social protection tool in many African countries. Such schemes often employ household targeting, ostensibly to maximise poverty alleviation, based on assumptions about households and their functioning. Building on geographical work on both cash transfers and the household, we demonstrate how three starkly different versions of the household – imagined, documented and lived – are entailed in the design, implementation and outcomes of targeting.

We draw on datasets from a project that explored how social cash transfers intervene in household and community relations in two household targeted schemes: Malawi’s Social Cash Transfer Programme and Lesotho’s Child Grant. First, 109 interviews with key national and international stakeholders explored how the two household targeting designs reflect transnational political, technocratic and ideological considerations. Second, ethnographic research in two rural communities, focused around 20 recipient households, examined how the schemes play out in people’s lives.

Going beyond analyses that see cash transfer schemes as products of multi-scalar relations, with households as the most local end of a global–local spectrum, we identify three mismatched versions of the household, each intersecting across multiple spatial scales. The imagined household of the scheme blueprint (stable and easily defined) is a product of transnational relations between a range of actors. This is translated into a documented household, inscribed in national beneficiary registers that direct funding to specific constellations of individuals. The lived household, distinct from both, is fluid and porous and responds reflexively to the payments. Ultimately, the mismatch between these three households breeds resentment and undermines the legitimacy of the schemes, leading to their local subversion or reinterpretation. Finally, we propose that this three-fold conceptualisation of the household may be useful to geographers seeking to understand the effects of a diversity of social policy interventions that target households.