Contrary to popular understanding, there is little evidence that increasing participation in social protection enhances the development of girls in participating households. What happens to girls’ roles and responsibilities when households participate in social protection schemes in rural Ethiopia and Andhra Pradesh? This article argues that effects cannot be answered with a methodology that considers girls’ schooling or workloads in isolation as current literature tends to do. It concludes with a caution that by improving the short-term lives of vulnerable families, social protection schemes put girls’ schooling and workloads at risk in the longer term.
The article reviews literature addressing the effects of social protection on children’s work and uses quantitative and qualitative data collected by Young Lives from 2005 onwards to explore whether (India’s MGNREG and Ethiopia’s PSNP are partially responsible for the premature transfer of responsibilities for social reproduction to the next generation.
Overall, the paper highlights the relationship between social protection and social development outcomes, but perhaps not in the direction that is intended. These unintended consequences are a result of the success as well as the failure of these schemes. Social protection schemes can:
- Increase girls’ workloads and significantly reduce their time for study and leisure. This increase relates to the invisibility of girl and women’s work, and the gendered nature of social provisioning.
- Have mixed effects on girls’ depending on age and who is the target of the grant, such as increasing the workload for non-beneficiary children in households receiving CCTs
- Sharpen tensions between individual and family life courses, reflecting the embedded nature of girls in a set of activities shaped by social norms. For example:
- Costs of schooling for some siblings are covered, but not others
- Following the migration of an older sibling, the burden of social provisioning often fell to a younger sibling
One way to revalue social reproduction in social policy and planning, and recognise girls’ role in this is to give greater recognition to invisible work and the context of social relationships which shape girls’ motivations and constrain their agency.
