Do Agricultural Support and Cash Transfer Programmes Improve Nutritional Status

Cash transfer and agricultural support programmes are both used to improve nutrition outcomes in developing countries. Previous reviews of these programmes have examined their ability to improve both food consumption and anthropometric outcomes, but none has compared the evidence between the two. We update previous reviews, more than doubling the number of studies on each programme type based on an additional literature search of over 13,000 articles in eight databases. We find: (i) although there are about the same number of programmes of each type, many more papers have been written about the cash transfer programmes than the agricultural programmes; (ii) both programme types improved the quality of food consumption though evidence on quantity is more mixed; and (iii) both programme types show weak evidence of improvements in anthropometric outcomes.