Impacts of cash transfer and "cash plus" programs on self- perceived stress in Africa: Evidence from Ghana, Malawi, and Tanzania.

Poverty and poor mental health are closely linked. Cash transfers have significantly expanded globally. Given their objectives around poverty reduction and improving food security, a major chronic stressor in Africa, cash transfers may affect mental health outcomes.

'Poverty can break a home': Exploring mechanisms linking cash plus programming and intimate partner violence in Ghana.

A growing body of research in West Africa and globally shows that cash transfers can decrease intimate partner violence (IPV). The purpose of this study was to explore how the government of Ghana's Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) 1000 program, an unconditional cash transfer plus health insurance premium waiver targeted at pregnant women and women with young children, influenced IPV experiences. Existing program theory hypothesizes three pathways through which cash transfers influence IPV, including: 1) increased economic security and emotional wellbeing; 2) reduced intra-household conflict; and 3) increased women's empowerment.

Impact evaluation of a social protection programme paired with fee waivers on enrolment in Ghana's National Health Insurance Scheme.

Objectives: The study aimed to understand the impact of integrating a fee waiver for the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) with Ghana's Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) 1000 cash transfer programme on health insurance enrolment.

Setting: The study was conducted in five districts implementing Ghana's LEAP 1000 programme in Northern and Upper East Regions.

Participants: Women, from LEAP households, who were pregnant or had a child under 1 year and who participated in baseline and 24-month surveys (2497) participated in the study.

ANALYSING MULTIDIMENSIONAL CHILD POVERTY IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: FINDINGS USING AN INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE APPROACH.

This study provides with a first indication on the number of multidimensionally poor children in sub-Saharan Africa. It presents a methodology measuring multidimensional child deprivation within and across countries, and it is in line with the Sustainable Development Goal 1 focusing on multidimensional poverty by age and gender. Using the Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) methodology, the study finds that 67% or 247 million children are multidimensionally poor in the thirty sub-Saharan African countries included in the analysis.

Multidimensional Child Poverty in three Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper describes and reviews the process of constructing a Multidimensional Child Poverty Measure in three sub-Saharan Africa countries: Mali, Malawi, and Tanzania. These countries recently (in 2015 and 2014) constructed such indicator using UNICEF's Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) methodology and conducted a comprehensive Child Poverty study including both deprivation and monetary poverty. This work describes how the indicator was adapted in the different contexts, discussing critical issues arisen during the process of the study, and it discusses the results of these studies in comparison.

Accountability for the human right to health through treaty monitoring: Human rights treaty bodies and the influence of concluding observations.

Employing novel coding methods to evaluate human rights monitoring, this article examines the influence of United Nations (UN) treaty bodies on national implementation of the human right to health. The advancement of the right to health in the UN human rights system has shifted over the past 20 years from the development of norms under international law to the implementation of those norms through national policy. Facilitating accountability for this rights-based policy implementation under the right to health, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) monitors state implementation by reviewing periodic reports from state parties, engaging in formal sessions of 'constructive dialogue' with state representatives, and issuing concluding observations for state response.