Research in Brief

Social Protection, Community Participation and State-citizen Relations: Evidence from a Cash Transfer Programme in South-central Somalia

Research in Brief 151

Cash transfers are an increasingly popular development intervention. Many studies have focused on the positive impacts of cash transfers on the socio-economic welfare of recipients. Meanwhile, relatively little has been covered regarding when, and under what conditions, cash transfers can have potentially transformative social effects in improving inclusive governance, local development and state-society relations. This study considers whether cash transfers may enable recipients to make informal tax contributions to local community development projects in south-central Somalia.

Summary of article published in Social Policy & Administration.

Authors

Vanessa van den Boogaard

Vanessa van den Boogaard is a Research Fellow at the ICTD and a Senior Research Associate at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She completed her PhD thesis on informal revenue generation and statebuilding in Sierra Leone, and has ongoing research on the topic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia. Vanessa leads the ICTD’s new programme on civil society engagement in tax reform and co-leads the research programme on informal taxation.

Fabrizio Santoro

Fabrizio is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, and the Research Lead for the second component of the ICTD's DIGITAX Research Programme. His main research interests relate to governance, public finance, and taxation, with a strong focus on impact evaluation methodologies and statistical analysis. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex.

Michael Walker

Research Economist at The Center for Effective Global Action, Berkeley, California, USA

Tracy Beyuo

Tracy Beyuo is an undergraduate at the University of Toronto and Research Assistant for LoGRI and the Munk School.
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Publication Details

Publisher: Institute of Development Studies
Date: February 2025
Citation: van den Boogaard, V.; Santoro, F.; Walker, M. and Beyuo, T. (2025) Social Protection, Community Participation and State-citizen Relations: Evidence from a Cash Transfer Programme in South-central Somalia, ICTD Research in Brief 151, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies DOI: 10.19088/ICTD.2025.010
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Keywords: cash transfers, informality, social protection, Somalia