- **Coordination with complementary programs is particularly important.** The meta‐analysis finds that multiple programs improved resilience while achieving other positive outcomes through complementary programs or accompanying measures. Examples include Ethiopia’s Household Asset Building Program, which occurred alongside the PSNP, and Lesotho’s Emergency Food Grant Program, which occurred alongside their CGP Child Grant Program.

**It is also hoped that safety nets will have intergenerational impacts on labor productivity through boosting education and health outcomes of children in beneficiary households** . Our findings indicate that safety net programs seem to have the most impact in enhancing access among extremely poor households rather than access overall, and that educational impacts can be strengthened through strong messaging to beneficiaries about program intentions. However, to realize these gains, careful planning is required to ensure the quality of basic services and to address barriers to entry. Beyond addressing supply‐ side constraints, explicit design modifications to motivate behavior change can be effective. To enhance the possibility of realizing opportunities for improved human development and productive inclusion, there should be additional messaging, a nudge toward new behavior, or relevant conditionality. The findings on school attendance and enrollment are illustrative. The nature and enforcement of conditionality can be quite soft in many instances, especially considering capacity constraints in monitoring and enforcement, as well as in ensuring reliable service delivery.

# **Another goal of safety nets is ultimately to engage households in more productive activities that lead**

**to higher income trajectories.** Beyond increased ownership of productive assets and livelihood diversification, safety nets hope to move households out of poverty, or at least to a less extreme level of vulnerability. The meta‐analysis does not find detrimental impacts of programs on the willingness of beneficiaries to work, and the limited evidence on the topic suggests the opposite. Beneficiaries are more likely to launch or expand business activities or to work more on their own farms while avoiding labor that may be damaging to their health. While more research is still needed to understand the exact pathways to stronger outcomes, our findings suggest the following:

- **A multi‐dimensional approach may be better suited to supporting productive inclusion than a traditional safety net approach.** For the sample of African countries at hand, safety nets are neither distorting labor market outcomes nor fully equipping beneficiaries to optimally participate in productive and income‐earning activities. On the other hand, recent work focusing on the BRAC Graduation approach provides encouraging evidence on a multifaceted graduation program across six countries, including Ethiopia and Ghana. These programs integrate a combination of accompanying interventions with income support and have shown strong results in various pilots.

- **In the future, both planned and ongoing safety net programs might consider how to integrate complementary interventions to boost productive and employment outcomes.** In recent years, there has been growing focus on how large cash grants – typically blended with access to savings and credit, basic financial skills, and on‐the‐job or apprenticeship training – can lead to improved employment opportunities for select groups such as youth.

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