 My name is Sylvia Senu. I'm from Ghana, the University of Ghana. I'm actually with the Institute of Statistics called Social and Economic Research in the University. I present to you findings from some small interest I found recently on stunting. You may want to ask me what is stunting? Well, from this picture you can see what I'm actually trying to inform you about. It's actually the reduction in human growth. So children don't get to grow normally as they have to. Globally it is estimated that one out of four children are stunted. And there's an estimation of about 165 million children across the world who are stunted. And 90% of these people live in Africa and Asia. There's been actually a continuous reduction in stunting from 1990, where we had about 35% of children who were stunted. To now, somewhere around 2011, the last estimate they did was about 26%. Stunting is actually a big problem because it reduces the child's chances of survival, even from birth. And then when the child is lucky to be born, the possibility of not developing fully in terms of mentally and everything is there. And it carries on to maturity. Counts transfer as a means of reducing vulnerability, ensuring adequate nutrition, access to basic social services, and helping the poor rise out of poverty is acknowledged worldwide. Such is the case for Ghana. In Ghana in 2008, in 2008, the government initiated a policy, a CTT program, where conditional cash are transmitted or remitted to households who fall below the poverty levels in Ghana. So the aim of this thing is to help the poor actually leap out of poverty. So even though Ghana has made progress in achieving most of the MDGs, the MDGs pertaining to four and five, which has to do with maternal mortality and child mortality, this can actually hinder the progress. So that's why I actually took a special look at this topic. So this study will actually assess the impact of the cash transfer program that Ghana is having now on the children, human development. So I choose to use data collected by my institute. There we have anthropometry data in there. It's been collected over a period of time. So the first baseline survey was done in 2010, and then the second one, which is the follow-up, was done in 2012. Well, this is just about those who collaborated in collecting the data. The leap is supposed to be those who actually benefited from the program. And then the yield I'm using here are my control group. They didn't benefit from the program. So what I actually intend to do is to… So the total sample was about 190 children, 72 actually for the treated group, and then about 118 for the control group. What I want to do here is to look at children between the ages of zero to 60 months from first period to second period. What are the changes in their human development? It's what I'm looking. So here I employ the double difference estimate to look at it so that I want to see what the changes are over time. Does the program have any significant impact on the children, human development index? So these are my results. This is just by way of introducing to you the kind of people we're talking about. The mean ages of course are between 24 months. Overall, there were about 96 males and 94 females who made up the total sample of 190. Tell me a few of the children with your parents. So there are children in your household. 22 of them are male and 5 of them are male. It is… Drop your microphone. Sorry. It is imperative to note that some of these households have orphans. They have the disabled people in their households. Well, as a way of result, without actually running the regression, we saw a general decrease in the trend of stunting between these households. This is the control group. We realized that they had a reduction from about 53.4% of children who were stunted in 2010 to 39.8% in 2012. And it also happened for the treated group. So finally, what were the findings saying? The findings were that even though stunting reduced over time, we can't attribute the reduction to the program. Because our interested variable, which is the treatment over time, was not significant. But the time variable, which shows just the period at which various studies were made, were significant at about 13% for severe stunting, for normal stunting, and at about 18% for severe stunting. And also, we noted that stunting was more prevalent among male children than in female children. However, other interesting covariates we thought could influence this explanation. They didn't show any significance. Mother's education, household income, housing facility, they all seem not to have any significant relation with stunting. So our initial conclusions are that initial expectation of the transfer program is to improve nutritional components of beneficiaries to help curb the prevalence of stunting. Results, however, show that the change cannot be linked with this program. This in our opinion could be linked with a shortfall of the program implementation process. Because payments were normally delayed, sometimes not paid. So by recommendation, we would just say that payment should be regular and more consistent. The amount of money should be more appreciable. Also, mothers should be sensitized about the causes and damaging effects of stunting, because it actually happens between the first two months of the child. And after that, it's a done deal. So from pregnancy to year two, you need to feed your children very well. Thank you.