Policy Diffusion, Domestic Politics, and Social Assistance in Lesotho, 1998-2012

In the 2000s interest in the use of cash transfer programmes grew across much of sub-Saharan Africa (Garcia and Moore 2012; Niño-Zarazúa et al. 2012), and unconditional cash transfers began to replace food aid as the central formof social transfers in many African countries (Devereux 2012). Hanlon, Barrientos, and Hulme (2010) have described this as a paradigmatic shift in thinking about development towards a ‘welfarist’ approach.