Social protection is particularly important for children, in view of their higher levels of
vulnerability compared to adults, and the role that social protection can play in ensuring adequate
nutrition, access to and utilization of social services. While existing evidence shows that social protection
programmes successfully address several dimensions of child well-being – often in an indirect way – a
move towards a more “child sensitive” approach to social protection has recently been advocated at the
highest level in the international development community. Until now, however, the efforts that have been
made to analyse the evidence regarding how social protection affects children have been based on wider
analyses of the overall impact of social protection on different groups of recipients, or on analyses based
on specific outcomes. This paper explores this issue in more detail. Based on an extensive analysis of the
existing evidence on the impact of social protection programmes in the developing world, the paper aims
to assess what are the channels that have to be taken into account to understand how the benefits of
social protection could be maximized with specific regard to the different dimensions of children’s wellbeing.