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Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) provide mothers of school-age children in extreme poverty with a cash subsidy conditional on their children's attendance at school and health clinics. This paper builds on the author's earlier gender analysis and critique of these programmes by examining evaluations of CCTs in order to assess the evidence for their claim to empower women. It analyses the assumptions underlying the definitions of empowerment used in the evaluations, questions their adequacy, and advances alternative measures of empowerment. In so doing it hopes to stimulate debate about theory, methodology and policy. …

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) provide mothers of school-age children in extreme poverty with a cash subsidy conditional on their children's attendance at school and health clinics. This paper builds on the author's earlier gender analysis and critique of these programmes by examining evaluations of CCTs in order to assess the evidence for their claim to empower women. It analyses the assumptions underlying the definitions of empowerment used in the evaluations, questions their adequacy, and advances alternative measures of empowerment. In so doing it hopes to stimulate debate about theory, methodology and policy. …