Definition

Child or Family Benefits can be defined as cash and tax transfers for children or households with children. They may be:

• (quasi) Universal (i.e., to all children under a certain age/ under 18), categorical (e.g., to children with disabilities), or targeted based on welfare assessments (e.g., affluence testing or means testing) or other criteria;
• Contributory (i.e., financed through contributions from employer and employees) or non-contributory/tax-financed;
• Conditional (i.e., payment is tied to certain conditionalities, e.g., school attendance or vaccinations of children), linked to accompanying measures or unconditional.

They can take the form of direct cash transfers or of tax breaks and credits, and be paid specifically to certain family types (lone-parent families) or certain children (for example, child disability benefits) (for more, see UNICEF and ILO, 2023, Chapter 2.1).  

Rationale

Child and family benefits, as shown by evidence, reduce poverty, improve food security, health (reduce mortality under the age of 5, use of health services, mental health), nutrition (dietary diversity), early childhood development, education outcomes for children (school enrollment and attendance), promote gender equality and support children with disabilities, while also enhancing social cohesion, reducing inequality and increasing resilience to shocks.

Key features

While the coverage can progressively be expanded based on financial resources available with the objective to tend towards universalization, key dimensions that are key to consider to improve the impact of child/family benefits are:

• Adequacy: Ensuring adequate benefit levels;
• Predictability: Increasing the regularity of payments and expected duration of benefits;
• Unconditionality: Removing punitive responsibility (e.g., freezing benefit amount in case of non-compliance with conditionalities). It is rather recommended that the reason for non-compliance should be investigated, and recipients should be referred to relevant services;
• Universality: Progressively expanding programme coverage to all children through geographic expansion, reduction of age restriction or income threshold for means testing. Note that universality can also be achieved through a coordinated mixed-scheme approach, which combine (contributory) social insurance and non-contributory schemes to achieve universal or close-to-universal coverage of children (e.g., Argentina).

Moreover, there are specific design and implementation features that help improve the multidimensional impacts while also promoting gender equality for children and their caretakers and making a programme more shock responsive, namely:

• Access to complementary services: Implementing so called "cash-plus" approaches, where cash transfers are combined with support to access essential services, e.g., related to nutrition, health, education, or child protection. This can be done either by referring to existing services, or by offering additional services or benefits to recipients, e.g., nutrition counselling sessions;  

• Sensitivity to gender and disability: Assessing the specific needs of women and girls, and people with disabilities, and adjust the program design accordingly, e.g., by referring to specific services or paying additional benefits for children with disabilities, or by incentivising the involvement of fathers in the complementary services to avoid additional burden on mothers, etc.;

• Shame proofing: Designing and implementing a child benefit program in a way that minimizes any stigma (e.g. access to program as a right rather than a handout, protecting recipient´s privacy, etc.);

• Shock responsiveness: Investing in preparedness and contingency measures to ensure continuity of program during shock; considering flexible and scalable program design in times of shocks (e.g. higher benefits, increased coverage, simplified enrolment and payments) and pre-identify emergency funding; coordinating with disaster risk management authorities to detect shocks and coordinate response;