in dietary diversity. The findings highlight how transfers, especially in cash, represent an opportunity to improve the quality of life. The simulations show that the best results on reducing extreme poverty are achieved if programs are accurately targeted and if they can generate multiplier effects on the real incomes of beneficiaries. This review of 27 programs across Africa points out specific design and implementation considerations that may maximize desired outcomes:

- **Ensure that transfers are large enough and adjust based on inflation** . Based on global experience and the impact evaluations included in this analysis, a good ‘rule of thumb’ is that the transfer should deliver at least 20 percent of pre‐program consumption in order to generate widespread benefits. Furthermore, in high‐inflation environments, maintaining the real value of transfers is important.

- **Programs with the strongest impacts have clear target groups and targeting protocols** . Targeting often involves categorical and easily interpretable inclusion criteria, such as the inclusion of children under 5 or households facing high dependency rations, as in the Malawi SCTP.

- **The predictability and timing of benefits can strongly determine consumption outcomes.** In the Zambia CGP, 98% of households received payments on time. Combined with short walks to payment sites and low transaction costs, the consistent timing of payments helps to explain the program’s high success rate, despite rather modest transfer sizes. By contrast, the weak impacts of the Ghana LEAP and Lesotho CGP programs have largely been attributed to irregular payments, with beneficiaries reporting unclear expectations on when transfers would arrive.

**A further objective of safety nets is to promote resilience** . Broadly, resilience can be understood as the ability of households to respond to and cope with shocks without resorting to negative coping strategies. Impact evaluations have typically not been devised to capture this concept well. In this context, our analysis explores the concept of resilience through the lens of risk management (including savings and private transfers), improved coping strategies (reductions in informal wage work and child labor), and livelihood diversification (ownership of productive assets). The meta‐analysis evidence is strongest for livelihood diversification, and it is weaker for the impact of safety nets on risk management and improved coping strategies. Lessons from both our meta‐analysis and simulations include:

- **Build safety net programs during ‘good times’ to ensure that transfers can be used to promote resilience and to respond to shocks.** Both the Tanzania PSSN and the Ethiopia PSNP have been able to successfully and speedily scale up their safety net programs during periods of widespread drought and food price inflation.

- **Productive assets are particularly valuable to extremely poor households – those most dependent on agriculture.** Our meta‐analysis and partial equilibrium simulations indicate the potential of safety nets to boost the incidence of productive asset ownership among these households.

- **The size and frequency of transfers can have opposing impacts on different aspects of resilience.** Large, lump‐sum payments have had greater impacts on durables and productive asset expenditures. On the other hand, programs most effective at reducing negative coping strategies have tended to deliver smaller, regular transfers to beneficiaries.

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