The Impact of Terminating Cash Support to Displaced Syrian Children in Jordan
Dr. Jacob de Hoop, UNICEF
Humanitarian funding is volatile. Consequently, humanitarian interventions are often scaled down while the crisis they are designed to address is still ongoing. This study explores the implications of scaling down a humanitarian intervention for program beneficiaries. The program, which was developed by UNICEF Jordan, supports the school participation of displaced Syrian children. It provides poor displaced households with a combination of unconditional cash transfers and text messages that encourage caregivers to send their children back to school after the winter break, a precarious period during which many children drop out of school. Relying on a cluster-randomized trial with multiple treatment arms, the study explores and decomposes the impacts of (discontinuing) the cash transfers and the encouragement messages on child wellbeing.
About the speaker
Jacobus (Jacob) de Hoop works as a manager of humanitarian policy research at UNICEF Office of Research - Innocenti. He is also a member of the Transfer Project. His research examines how social protection programs implemented in developing countries and humanitarian contexts affect children and adolescents. He previously worked as a researcher at the International Labour Organization (ILO), was affiliated with the Paris School of Economics as a Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow, and worked for the World Bank as field manager on a study examining the effects of conditional and unconditional cash transfers in Malawi. He holds a PhD in economics from the Tinbergen Institute and VU University in Amsterdam.
Venue: 0.16/0.17
Date: 06 June 2019
Time: 12:00 - 13:00 CET