Of every 1,000 children born in Kenya, a country in East Africa, 32 don’t make it to their first birthdays. Study after study has…

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    Of every 1,000 children born in Kenya, a country in East Africa, 32 don’t make it to their first birthdays. Study after study has explored how to improve those impressive numbers, in Kenya and elsewhere. But a decade-long study on alleviating poverty found a simple solution. Giving $1,000 to poor families lowered infant mortality rates by nearly half, and deaths in children under 5 by 45 percent. Those are much bigger drops than have been credited to routine immunizations, for example, or bed nets to prevent malaria.

    “This is easily the biggest impact on child survival that I’ve seen from an intervention that was designed to alleviate poverty,” said Harsha Thirumurthy, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the work. The decline in infant mortality is a “showstopping result,” he said.

    The outcomes suggest that delivering even smaller amounts of money to families — especially those that live near a hospital — immediately before or after the birth of a child might allow women to seek medical care and drastically improve their children’s chances of survival. More than 100 low- and middle-income countries have explored so-called cash transfers, especially after the pandemic began. Generally, the experiments have found that giving money to poor families improves school attendance, nutrition and use of health services.

(Apoorva Mandavilli. www.nytimes.com, 18.08.2025. Adaptado.)

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