Cash transfers have been increasingly used in low- and middle-income countries as a poverty reduction and social protection tool. Despite their potential for empowering vulnerable groups (especially women), the evidence for such outcomes remains unclear. Additionally, little is known about how this broad concept fits into and is perceived in such programs. For example, Lesotho’s Child Grant Program (CGP) is an unconditional cash transfer targeting poor and vulnerable households with children. The CGP has been presented as one of Lesotho’s flagship programs in developing the country’s social safety net system. Using the CGP’s early phases as a case study, this research aims to capture how program stakeholders understood and operationalized the concept of economic empowerment (especially women’s) in Lesotho’s CGP. The qualitative analysis relied on the triangulation of information from a review of program documents and semi-structured key informant interviews with program stakeholders. First, the program documents were coded deductively while the interview transcripts were coded inductively, then both materials were analyzed thematically. Finally, differences or disagreements within each theme were explored individually according to the program’s chronology, the stakeholders’ affiliation, and their role in the CGP. The complexity of economic empowerment was reflected in the diversity of definitions found in the desk review and interviews. Economic empowerment was primarily understood as improving access to economic resources and opportunities, and less so, as agency and social and economic inclusion. There were stronger disagreements on other definitions as they seemed to be a terminology primarily used by specific stakeholders. This diversity of definitions impacted how these concepts were integrated into the program, with particular gaps between the strategic vision and operational units as well as between the role this concept was perceived to play, and the effects evaluated so far.

Conventional research ethics focus on avoidance of harm to individual participants through measures to ensure informed consent. In long-term ethnographic research projects involving multiple actors, however, a wider concept of harm is needed. We apply the criminological concept of social harm, which focuses on harm produced through and affecting wider social relations, to a research project that we undertook in Malawi. Through this, we show how structural economic inequalities shape the consequences of research for the differently positioned parties involved. Specifically, we focus on dilemmas around transferring resources within three social fields: our relations with a Malawian ethics committee; our interventions in a rural community; and our efforts to engage the policy community. Each of these involved multiple and differently placed individuals within broader, multi-scalar structural relations and reveals the inadequacies of conventional codes of ethics.

The literature on later-life care is dominated by a focus on women as carers and older people as receivers, not providers, of care, as well as the analytical disembedding of care from wider social and economic processes. We examine the experiences of care and caring of former labour migrants who had migrated from Lesotho to work in South Africa’s mines in order to examine how these have changed over their lives. The latter demanded the tying of experience into wider social, economic and demographic processes. The research identified a methodological issue in the study of later-life care: survivor bias.

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