Investing in social protection in sub-Saharan Africa has taken on a new urgency as HIVand AIDS interact with
other drivers of poverty to simultaneously destabilise livelihoods systems and family and community safety nets.
Cash transfer programmes already reach millions of people in South Africa, and in other countries in southern
and East Africa plans are underway to reach tens and eventually hundreds of thousands more. Cash transfers
worldwide have demonstrated large impacts on the education, health and nutrition of children. While the
strongest evidence is from conditional cash transfer evaluations in Latin America and Asia, important results are
emerging in the newer African programmes. Cash transfers can be implemented in conjunction with other services
involving education, health, nutrition, social welfare and others, including those related to HIVand AIDS. HIV/
AIDS-affected families are diverse with respect to household structure, ability to work and access to assets,
arguing for a mix of approaches, including food assistance and income-generation programmes. However, cash
transfers appear to offer the best strategy for scaling up to a national system of social protection, by reaching
families who are the most capacity constrained, in large numbers, relatively quickly. These are important
considerations for communities hard-hit by HIVand AIDS, given the extent and nature of deprivation, the longterm
risk to human capital and the current political willingness to act.
Keywords: social protection; cash transfers; HIV; AIDS; Africa; Latin America; maternal and child health
and nutrition; education; gender