Purpose
Public policies oriented towards youth are crucial for a country’s future development. Ujana Salama (meaning ‘safe youth’) is a bundled youth livelihoods intervention that adopts a ‘cash plus’ model, which is conducted by United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) with the Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF). The intervention aims to support youth from vulnerable households during the transition to adulthood, a period in which teenagers face substantial risks, such as school drop-out, violence, sexually transmitted diseases, early pregnancy and early marriage. To break the cycle of intergenerational poverty, in 2017 UNICEF Tanzania launched the cash plus intervention targeted to youth and layered on top of an existing government cash transfer programme run by TASAF since 2013. This intervention goes beyond a cash transfer programme and utilises an asset-building framework which recognises that youth need a combination of social, health and financial assets to safely transition to adulthood. The ‘plus’ intervention on top of the cash transfers includes various opportunities for the youth, such as life skills training, grants, mentoring and coaching on livelihood enhancement and sexual and reproductive health, and linkages to youth-friendly health services. The results of the impact evaluation will inform the design of future iterations of the government’s social protection plan and will provide innovative programmatic guidance on the safe transition to adulthood of Tanzanian youth.
Action
EDI Global, contracted by UNICEF, joined the Ujana Salama evaluation team in 2017 and conducted the baseline, midline (2018), wave three (2019) and wave four (2021) surveys in 130 communities in Iringa and Mbeya regions in Tanzania. For each wave, EDI Global led the preparation of the survey tools and the training of field teams, as well as the implementation and oversight of all fieldwork and data quality. EDI Global was able to successfully track 93% of youth in the last round in 2021, four years after the baseline survey, and to re-interview 90% of those tracked, which is a huge achievement considering the high mobility of some youth in their early twenties, who tend to migrate to new areas, mainly for work, studies or marriage reasons. This was achieved through the collection of highly reliable data across each round, a rigorous system for generating identifiers in the survey tools for the formation of new households, and the inclusion of necessary questions for tracking.
Impact
In 2017, EDI Global put in place solid foundations for this rigorous impact evaluation by surveying a sample of 2,793 adolescents across 2,441 households at the baseline, and then followed the cohort of youth over four years as some of them migrated and formed new households during the transition to adulthood. EDI Global conducted a large number of interviews across the four waves, including:
youth Interviews
household interviews
health facilities interviews
community leader interviews
qualitative interviews
average of tracking success rate of the youth sample
average of re-interviewing rate of the youth sample
The high panel data quality of this impact evaluation has led to prolific research: public reports, academic papers, blogs and presentations.
As part of the Evaluation Team, EDI Global’s team has contributed to all reports for each wave. The reports and findings for the previous rounds are available here:
- Tanzania Adolescent Cash Plus Evaluation Team, 2024. A Cash Plus Model for Safe Transitions to a Healthy and Productive Adulthood: Round 4 Impact Evaluation Report. UNICEF Office of Research and EDI Global
- Tanzania Adolescent Cash Plus Evaluation Team, 2020. Impact evaluation for a cash plus model for safe transitions to a healthy and productive adulthood: Wave 3 report. UNICEF Office of Research and EDI Global
- Tanzania Adolescent Cash Plus Evaluation Team, 2019. Impact evaluation for a cash plus model for safe transitions to a healthy and productive adulthood: Midline report. UNICEF Office of Research and EDI Global
- Tanzania Adolescent Cash Plus Evaluation Team, 2018. Impact evaluation for a cash plus model for safe transitions to a healthy and productive adulthood: baseline report. UNICEF Office of Research and EDI Global
The following academic papers using the data of the Cash Plus study are below:
Leah Prencipe, Tanja A J Houweling, Frank J van Lenthe, Lusajo Kajula, Tia Palermo, on behalf of the Tanzania Adolescent Cash Plus Evaluation Team, Effects of Adolescent-Focused Integrated Social Protection on Depression: A Pragmatic Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial of Tanzania’s Cash Plus Intervention, American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 191, Issue 9, September 2022, Pages 1601–1613
Palermo T, Prencipe L, Kajula L, on behalf of the Tanzania Cash Plus Evaluation Team. (2021). “Government implemented cash plus model reduces violence experiences and perpetration among adolescents in Tanzania.” American Journal of Public Health, 111(12): 2227-2238
Prencipe L, Houweling TAJ, van Lenthe F, Kajula L, Palermo T, on behalf of the Tanzania Cash Plus Evaluation Team. (2022). “Impacts of a cash plus program on adolescent mental health.” American Journal of Epidemiology (2022).
Ranganathan M, Quinones S, Palermo T, Gilbert U, Kajula L, on behalf of the Tanzania Cash Plus Evaluation Team. (2022). Transactional sex among adolescent girls and young women enrolled in a cash plus intervention in rural Tanzania: a mixed-methods study. Journal of the International AIDS Society, 25: e26038.
Waidler J, Gilbert U, Mulokozi A, Palermo T, on behalf of the Tanzania Cash Plus Evaluation Team. (2022). “Safe Transitions to Adulthood: Evidence from a cluster randomized control trial of a multi-component intervention layered onto a national social protection programme on sexual behavior and health seeking among Tanzania’s youth.” Studies in Family Planning (online ahead of print).
EDI Global’s team has also published several blogs based on the learning and implementation of the four waves of the Cash Plus study including:
Strategies for Reducing Attrition Rates in Tracking Surveys
Attrition is one of the biggest challenges that researchers face when implementing longitudinal….
Views from the Field No. 8 | What are the key elements of a consent form for a household survey?
Obtaining informed consent is key to the process of protecting survey respondents and to the validity of the research. Research respondent protection and data protection has always been central to EDI’s ethos…
Views from the Field No. 4 | Keep successfully on track: Utilising tracking tools in baseline surveys
Drawing on our collective experience at EDI in designing baseline surveys and implementing various follow-up surveys in developing countries, we provide some practical guidelines to maximise data quality and to facilitate tracking of respondents.
Recent presentations related to the Cash Plus study are presented below:
Tia Palermo, Lusajo Kajula, Ulrike Gilbert & Frank Eetaama. “Evidence from a government cash plus program for adolescents in Tanzania.” Intersectoral collaboration on “Cash Plus” approaches Session of the UNICEF Webinar series: Integrating social protection and health in sub-Saharan Africa (virtual presentation). New York, NY, November 16, 2021.
Frank Eetaama. “A Cash Plus Model for Safe Transitions to a Healthy and Productive Adulthood:
Experience from Tanzania.” International Workshop on HIV & Adolescence 2021. September 29, 2021