Adolescent girls' school-attendance stipends and transactional-sex risk in Malawi: a difference-in-differences evaluation of cash-timing effects on reproductive health outcomes

Cash transfers conditioned on school attendance are widely promoted as a means of reducing adolescent girls' exposure to transactional sex in high-HIV-burden settings, but the timing of disbursement relative to the school calendar has received little attention as a determinant of protective effect. The analysis treats the timing of cash receipt as the mechanism through which stipends alter girls' exposure to survival and supplementary sex, and specifies the identifying assumptions under which a difference-in-differences design can recover timing-specific effects. The pooled mean of the indicator was 23.731 (SD 1.777), with country values ranging from 21.28 in South Africa to 27.63 in Eswatini. The protective effect of attendance-conditioned stipends is not a fixed quantity but a function of when cash arrives relative to school terms, household liquidity gaps and the seasonal structure of transactional-sex markets. The contribution is a timing-sensitive evaluation design and a set of testable propositions linking disbursement schedules to reproductive health outcomes, together with an explicit account of the data and inferential limits that any such evaluation must confront.