NPR | Researchers discover a secret weapon that saves babies’ lives. And it’s not medical.
To save the lives of infants and small children living in low- and middle-income countries, there are a handful of tried and tested tools, like anti-malarial drugs, bed nets and vaccines. The results from a massive experiment in rural Kenya suggests another: cash.
Infants born to people who received $1,000, no-strings-attached, were nearly half as likely to die as infants born to people who got no cash, according to a report published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Cash cut mortality in children under 5 by about 45%, the study researchers found, on par with interventions like vaccines and anti-malarials.
“This paper is really well done, and the result itself is pretty stunning,” says Heath Henderson, an economist at Drake University who wasn’t involved in the study. Historically, it’s been “difficult to study the impacts of cash transfers on mortality with any sort of rigor,” he says. “This study is different,” he says, and suggests cash can help people get life-saving care.
Over the past decade or so, the idea of simply giving people living in poverty cash has gained traction, in part by evidence that it can work. The best evidence comes from what researchers call randomized controlled trials. In this set-up, an experimental group gets cash, a control group doesn’t, and researchers look for differences in measurable outcomes, like income or savings, to understand what difference cash made.
While studies have found clear links between cash transfers and economic well-being, health has been harder to pin down, especially for the most dire health outcomes.
“Infant and child mortality in rural Kenya is an order of magnitude higher than it is in the U.S.,” says Edward Miguel, an economist at the University of California Berkeley and study co-author. “But it’s still a relatively rare event to have a child die. Statistically speaking, that means we need a really large sample size to have precise and reliable estimates of the effect of cash on child mortality.”
