Why would CCTs have a larger counterfactual impact than other interventions? This seems like an important point to make explicit, both for you and for everybody else.

Without going too in depth some of the reasons we think this are:

• The field is relatively uncrowded.

• A conditional cash transfer charity has relatively high potential scalability.

• There appear to be a number of relatively evidence-based and cost-effective conditions that a conditional cash transfer charity could base itself upon.

• A conditional cash transfer charity seems like it would be able to update on new information at a faster rate and to a greater extent than charities based on most other intervention areas.

This wasn’t included in the original post was because we felt a shorter post would be able to generate useful feedback.

My gut says that administering the costs & monitoring the behavior you're promoting in a CCT program (depending on what that is) may cost more than simply giving out vaccines, vitamin-A supplements, etc.

Your gut could be right :). My understanding is that in some areas the demand for some health interventions may be lagging behind the supply of those health interventions. For instance, this article and this article suggest major reasons for partial or no immunization in India are demand side. In those circumstances it’s plausible that conditional cash transfers could be a very cost-effective intervention and perhaps more cost-effective than supplying vaccines or micronutrients.

It also seems like there are more ways to mess up a CCT intervention than a simple direct service intervention.”

This could be true. At the moment we aren’t highly confident in our understanding of the relative logistical difficulty of different interventions. A consideration like this may make us update away from conditional cash transfers in future.

“HOWEVER, all of this is bracketed with a huge disclaimer: just go talk to an expert who knows more.”

Okay will do :)

I'd add "graduating additional grades" to the list of potential conditions.”

Sure. That’s something we will consider although we are unsure what the returns to schooling in low income countries are. For instance, the 2009 GiveWell Developing-world education (in-depth review) observes that there is little reliable information regarding the true relationship between schooling and later-life outcomes such as income.

Not at the moment. We’re currently near the beginning of a shallow review of conditional cash transfers and we haven’t wrote our research up in a form that people can comment on because we have found this process to be really time consuming. We also feel that some of the best feedback may be gathered early on in the research process by less time consuming posts like this as well as direct conversations/ email exchanges with specialists.

Ideally, in the future we will have important aspects of research written up in a form that people can comment on but at this stage it isn’t clear if that will include research on conditional cash transfers.