These enduring pandemic-related effects make the assessment and implementation of evidence-based strategies to combat poverty and improve health an even more urgent priority. The COVID-19 pandemic has markedly worsened these figures-an estimated 97 million more people lived in extreme poverty in 2020 (a 12% increase) and additional increases were seen in low-income countries in 2021 21. Consequently, living in poverty has been closely linked to a decrease in life expectancies, with a greater risk of mortality among both adults and children 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.ĭespite many years of progress, nearly 10% of the world’s population lived on less than US$1.90 per day (extreme poverty) in 2018, and more than 40% lived on less than US$5.50 per day 20 (upper middle-income poverty line). Poverty can negatively influence health outcomes through numerous, often interconnected pathways-food insecurity, access to and quality of healthcare, housing stability, neighbourhood safety, occupational risk, educational attainment, health behaviours, and social well-being, among others 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. Poverty has long been recognized as an important social determinant of health. Our findings support the use of anti-poverty programmes such as cash transfers, which many countries have introduced or expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic, to improve population health. Secondary heterogeneity analyses suggested similar effects for conditional and unconditional programmes, and larger effects for programmes that covered a larger share of the population and provided larger transfer amounts, and in countries with lower health expenditures, lower baseline life expectancy, and higher perceived regulatory quality. We found that cash transfer programmes were associated with significant reductions in mortality among children under five years of age and women. Here we evaluated the effects of large-scale, government-led cash transfer programmes on all-cause adult and child mortality using individual-level longitudinal mortality datasets from many low- and middle-income countries. ![]() ![]() The effects of these programmes on adult and child mortality rates remains an important gap in the literature, however, with existing evidence limited to a few specific conditional cash transfer programmes, primarily in Latin America 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. Over recent decades, cash transfer programmes have emerged as central components of poverty reduction strategies of many governments in low- and middle-income countries 6, 7. Cash transfer programmes provide non-contributory monetary transfers to individuals or households, with or without behavioural conditions such as children’s school attendance 6, 7. ![]() Poverty is an important social determinant of health that is associated with increased risk of death 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
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