Social transfers are increasingly being seen as a key tool in East and Southern Africa for
combating the triple threat of chronic poverty, hunger and HIV/AIDS. In the advent of the
global financial, food and fuel crises there are increasing calls for the scale up of such
programs to protect the poor and promote the human capital of children. As programs
expand, a number of design and implementation issues have begun to dominate the policy
debate, and one topic in particular is targeting, which has emerged as a contentious issue in
program design in the region. A variety of approaches are used in the region , ranging from
universal old age pensions, to means]tested child support grants, to a variety of community
based poverty and OVC targeted programs. To help better understand some of the different
targeting approaches in the region and their effectiveness, this paper examines three cash
transfer programs in Kenya, Malawi and Mozambique. All three countries employ
community based targeting mechanisms; each, however, targets different kinds of
households and employs different methodologies. This study combines descriptive
analysis of the targeting process with quantitative analysis comparing the characteristics of
beneficiary households taken from program baseline evaluation surveys with
characteristics of poor households based on national household surveys. The study uses
monetary, asset]based, and multidimensional measures to compare the effectiveness of the
programsf targeting when using economic poverty measures vs. multidimensional
measures. It then assesses these measures of effectiveness in light of the program
objectives and desired beneficiary populations, and explores policy implications for the
different targeting approaches.