# **1. Introduction**

Over the course of the last decade there has been a surge of national safety net programs across Africa. The growth of major safety net programs raises many questions: what has been the impact of such programs? What is the potential for safety net programs at a national scale? To what degree have lingering controversies been addressed, for example do safety nets create dependency, distort labor markets, or encourage anti‐social behavior? The recent surge of impact evaluations on safety nets now helps to address these issues and forms this basis of this paper.

This paper considers the impacts of safety net programs and the potential outcomes that can be realized in scaling up effective interventions. It applies a rigorous meta‐analysis on recent impact evaluations and develops partial equilibrium simulation models to consider the potential effects of scaling up safety nets in the African context. The meta‐analysis is the first known to the authors to systematically extract and standardize results across impact evaluation studies on key outcomes of African safety net programs. This standardization allows for a more detailed understanding of the heterogeneity in impact sizes of different programs and in different African countries. These findings are complemented by the latest international and regional evidence, broader systematic reviews, and considerable know‐how among practitioners engaged in the day‐to‐day implementation of such programs. To assess what impacts could be expected if programs are scaled up, partial‐equilibrium simulation models are deployed that draw on the findings of the meta‐analysis and integrate country‐specific household survey data.

The meta‐analysis highlights the value – and certain limitations – of impact evaluations in the sector. Safety nets are among the best‐evaluated interventions in social policy. The results generated by impact evaluations are often key to providing reliable data for informing decision‐making and adjusting programs to enhance their efficacy. Armed with better evidence on the factors that explain program outcomes, policy makers can decide whether to expand, modify, or eliminate a particular program. More generally, they can foster a culture for evidence‐based dialogue among the various actors involved in building and improving a safety net program. However, there is substantial heterogeneity in the impacts of different programs, suggesting that implementation and design factors, as well as local contexts, play important roles in determining the outcomes of programs. The meta‐analysis is useful for identifying implementation and design factors that may contribute to this variation in program outcomes and highlights the external validity limitations of focusing on only a few studies. In short, the impact evaluation evidence allows learning by doing in any one program context but can also inform the broader debate on safety nets through pooling results as in the meta‐analysis that this paper presents. This is important given the infancy of many programs and the need to improve program implementation.

Existing work has aggregated evaluation findings of social protection programs, including systematic reviews of specific interventions such as employment schemes and cash transfers (Bastagli et al. 2016; Hagen‐Zanker, McCord, and Holmes 2011; Kabeer, Piza, and Taylor 2012); systematic reviews of specific outcomes such as education (Baird et al. 2013; Saavedra and Garcia 2012); and, lastly, comparative country studies (Davis et al. 2016). However, this literature does not focus on programs in Africa and findings specific to this region can be difficult to glean within global studies. Furthermore, there are no studies that combine comparable cross‐country evidence to develop average effect sizes for a range of 2