political constraints and bring about pro‐growth reforms that align with the second aspect of the equity objective. While the meta‐analysis gathered evidence on the resilience and opportunity objectives, no counter‐factual based evidence was found on impacts on political constraints. Furthermore, no direct evidence was found on impacts of economic growth, most likely due to the problems of attribution; the unit of analysis for most studies is individuals or households, while economic growth is typically measured at a village, region, or country level. As such, we do not report on the impact of safety nets on aggregate economic growth in Africa.

_Figure 1: Conceptual framework to consider the impacts of Safety Net Programs in Africa_ <!-- Start of picture text --> Equity<br>• Consumption<br>• Food Security<br>• Poverty<br><!-- End of picture text -->

|Equity|Resilience|Opportunity|
|---|---|---|
|• Consumption|• Savings|• Human Capital|
|• Food Security|• Private Transfers|Investments:|
|• Poverty|• Reduced negative<br>coping mechanisms|• Education<br>• Health|
||• Livelihood<br>diversification<br>• Productive Assets|• Nutrition<br>• Earnings and Labor<br>Productivity|

<!-- Start of picture text --> Resilience<br>• Savings<br>• Private Transfers<br>• Reduced negative<br>coping mechanisms<br>• Livelihood<br>diversification<br>• Productive Assets<br><!-- End of picture text --> <!-- Start of picture text --> Opportunity<br>• Human Capital<br>Investments:<br>• Education<br>• Health<br>• Nutrition<br>• Earnings and Labor<br>Productivity<br><!-- End of picture text --> _Figure 1‐ Conceptual Framework to consider the impacts of Safety Net Programs in Africa_ Using this framework of the core objectives of safety nets – equity, resilience, and opportunity – we report on a meta‐analysis that compiles evidence on outcomes from impact evaluations of safety net programs in Sub‐Saharan Africa. The meta‐analysis systematically searched publicly available impact evaluation studies published between 2005 and 2016 using pre‐specified inclusion and exclusion criteria. The search built on the methodology of the IEG (2011), in which a series of evaluations on social safety net topics were surveyed from the World Bank’s impact evaluation databases, academic journals, and institutions involved directly in impact evaluations. Specifically, the World Bank databases included the Africa Impact Evaluation Initiative (AIM), Development Impact Evaluation (DIME), Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF), and Social Protection Publication Database. Institutions surveyed were the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), and International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie). Cross checks were also undertaken with more recent literature, including Bastagli et al (2016) and Davis et al (2016). The criteria to include an evaluation in our sample were: (i) the construction of a counterfactual and use of objective measures to estimate impact<sup>4</sup> ; (ii) robustness of findings, meaning studies that address plausible sources of bias and results that are convincingly robust to a variety of confounding factors; and (iii) relevancy of study to evaluating the impacts of social safety net programs (rather than other social policies or development programs). A final inspection and double checking ensures that only the studies that demonstrate relevance, technical rigor, and robust findings, are included in the sample. We utilize only the most recent version of results for any program and avoid

> 4 Included studies were RCTs, or deployed difference‐in‐difference or regression discontinuity methods.

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