In company with many other developing countries in the 1990s, South
Africa introduced an unconditional cash transfer program for children, which
had more than eleven million beneficiaries in 2014. The evaluation of similar
cash transfer programs is a widely researched space, however much of the
literature focuses on younger children, and outcomes which are both short
term, and tangible, such as school enrolment or physical health. Limited
research has been conducted on the impact of cash transfers on adolescents
and their caregivers, and in particular there is a scarcity of studies on the
impact of transfers on the mental health of recipients. This thesis exploits
exogenous variation in grant receipt to estimate the current and cumulative
grant impacts on the educational and mental health outcomes of teenagers,
and the channels through which these effects may take place. The grant is
found to have large positive effects on teen enrolment, yet no gains in human
capital achievement are seen. The mental health of adolescents is also an
under studied area, both domestically and internationally, with few, if any
studies performed on the impact of cash transfers on the intergenerational
transmission of depression (the single largest determinant of adolescent mental
health).