This paper uses data collected at a demographic surveillance site in KwaZulu-Natal to evaluate the impact of the Child Support Grant available to primary care givers. The site is in the Hlabisa district, in the northern part of the province of KwaZulu-Natal. This area is predominantly rural, is very poor, and has high rates of migration. In addition, it is bearing a heavy disease and death burden, associated with the HIV/ AIDS crisis. It is thus precisely the kind of area that the Child Support Grant is intended to reach. In the context of the AIDS epidemic, this data hopes to identify whether Child Support Grants appear to be shoring up households that have suffered from a member’s illness and death. And because this data is part of a larger, longitudinal data collection, it provides a rich set of information about all children in the demographic surveillance area, their parents, and the households in which they reside, with which to evaluate the reach of the grant.
