Cash, Caregiving, and the Youngest Refugees: Early Childhood Development Effects of Unconditional Transfers and Business Training in Displaced Households in Nairobi

Nearly half the world’s forcibly displaced are children, yet the dominant policy tool — unconditional cash — is justified on adult outcomes; its effects on early childhood development are assumed, not measured. This project adds a dedicated early-childhood-development arm to the ongoing randomized trial of cash and business training among roughly 4,000 refugee and host-community households in urban Nairobi (Saturating the Safety Net). Children aged 0–8 are assessed with validated instruments (CREDI, IDELA) alongside caregiver mental health, parenting stress, food security, and the home stimulation environment. Identification comes from experimental contrasts the original randomization preserves — training-plus-cash versus cash alone, and randomized differences in the timing of cash receipt — with the neighborhood-saturation design yielding community-level spillover estimates. Study design phase.